After Image

6 June - 31 July 2025 | Barrera Baldán Galeria

OPENING Friday 6 June, 8 pm

SCAN Projects and Barrera Baldán Galería are delighted to present AFTER IMAGE a group exhibition of works in painting and sculpture by artists Bernadette Kerrigan, Daniel Pettitt, and Ana H del Amo.

Ooh baby, I hear how you spend night-time

Wrapped like candy in a pure blue neon glow

Fade away and radiate

Fade away and radiate

Fade away and radiate

Fade away and radiate

(BLONDIE, Christ Stein, 1978)

AFTER IMAGE brings together works by Bernadette Kerrigan, Daniel Pettitt, and Ana H. del Amo considering the after image – when the human eye holds an image after the object has gone (“sees again”), as a lens for understanding layering, image repetition/retention, and referential meaning, memory, and interpretation in painting, drawing, and assembled sculpture.

This phenomenon - also known as the persistence of vision - is what allows a projected film to appear in fluid movement– the sequential still images blending into motion in the mind’s eye at twenty-four frames per second. Each cell image is a section of time, a still moment. A dozing viewer (“Debbie, asleep with the tv on”, after Chris Stein) receives flickering, glowing, fading images in the dark. Dreaming is believing.

AFTER IMAGE presents speculative works on paper, canvas, and wood operating within a liminal field, in visual conversation in this space. Layering and assemblage evoke spatial and visual memory, yet the clear materiality returns the eye to the immediate. Repetition is a strategy, and also an attentive pursuit, and there is an echo of the eye’s retinal screen in a canvas. Repetition is a core aspect of the concept of practice (and of pop culture) - they constitute an aspect of the works. Practice makes. Both abstract and referential, the works are uncanny - in the sense of being simultaneously familiar and strange, at the edge of our cultural vision but unnerving, and perhaps also desired.

The collected works plumb meaning and memory, and their fading, mis-remembered, and arbitrary nature. The object (canvas, wood, paper) is a surrogate retina, an extended section through time, the movement of the viewer activating and altering the view. The relationship between eye and hand, between image-memory and canvas, is an ongoing exploration of perception, and so, of experience and being.

A section through three distinct practices, AFTER IMAGE offers consideration of some shared interests in image making and memory, vision, cultural space, material, form, and perception.

AFTER IMAGE is organised and curated by SCAN PROJECTS with the support and contribution of Barrera Baldán Galeria, Sevilla.

All content copyright © Daniel Pettitt 2025