New and recent paintings and works on paper included in AFTER IMAGE at Barrera Baldán Galería, Seville, from 6 June to 31 July 2025, opening Friday 6 June at 8 pm. The exhibition presents painting, drawing and sculpture by Bernadette Kerrigan, Daniel Pettitt, and Ana H. del Amo, organised and curated by SCAN Projects with the support of the gallery.
The after image, also known as the persistence of vision, is the phenomenon by which the eye holds an image after the object has gone. It is what allows a projected film to appear in fluid movement, its still cells blending into motion at twenty-four frames per second. The exhibition takes this flicker, with a passing nod to Blondie's 'Fade Away and Radiate' and its image of a dozing viewer receiving glowing, fading images in the dark, as a lens for thinking about layering, repetition, retention, and the slippage between what is seen and what is remembered.
The works in this exhibition operate within a liminal field, as the curators say 'uncanny in the sense of being simultaneously familiar and strange, at the edge of our cultural vision but unnerving, and perhaps also desired'. Layering and assemblage evoke spatial and visual memory, yet the clear materiality of each surface returns the eye to the immediate. Repetition functions as both strategy and attentive pursuit, an echo of the retinal screen in the canvas itself.
The exhibition proposes the object, whether canvas, wood, or paper, as a surrogate retina: an extended section through time, activated and altered by the movement of the viewer. Across the three practices, AFTER IMAGE offers a consideration of shared interests in image-making and memory, vision, cultural space, material, form and perception.
The exhibition is accompanied by an artist talk at the Centre for Cultural Initiatives of the University of Seville (CIRCUS) with Pettitt, Kerrigan, and SCAN Projects curator Pedro Font Alba, and a broadcast feature on TVE.
Image: 'AFTER IMAGE' Private View, Barrera Baldán Galería, Seville 2025. © Daniel Pettitt. Photography: Daniel Pettitt.
