Slow Cooking

We are pleased to work with Reginald Colas to bring his solo Slow Cooking to life at the gallery. Opening on Friday, 1 August 2025, the exhibition opens at the tail end of several years of exchanging thoughts with friends about sharing creative expression in different forms and spaces (through art, cooking, music and gathering). The artist will be present for the opening and during “Slow Cooking” there will be an opportunity for other creatives to meet in the space to share their experiences of cooking slow. Gathering details TBA.

Reginald Colas’ artistic practice explores the human will to integrate internal contradictions, rendering this subtle psychological process visible through the tension between abstraction and realism. Colas’ characters are true to form but abstracted in light and color, with blotches transmogrifying their faces like memories slipping through the mind’s grip. His process involves layering memory upon memory—sometimes allowing one image to overtake another—mirroring the internal tug-of-war that comes with change.

Inspired by Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacity, Colas embraces the right to be unexplained, to exist without needing to be decoded. This influence is evident in the quiet autonomy of his subjects: they are not symbols of resistance, nor symbols of power. They simply are.

Colas returned to painting after serving 18 years in the United States Armed Forces, reviving his practice as a therapeutic strategy during his transition back to civilian life. This experience granted him a new way of seeing and expanded the possibilities of visual storytelling. His work reflects the push and pull between peace and war, stasis and dynamism—opposites that, like abstraction and realism, only exist in relation to one another. His characters embody this negotiation, resting in stillness while remaining alert to what may come.

In Slow Cooking Colas extends a vivid glance into the idea of Black nonchalance. Working with a characteristic kind of abstracted figuration, the audience encounters characters—and in one case a single ‹portrait or a car› that once belonged to his father—whose presence neither demands nor requires their attention. Colas’s works can be read as stand-alone compositions or a continuing panorama of every day being. For example, the works "I Never Ran from Rain in Church Clothes" and "Finally" depict an indoor and outdoor scene, respectively, the first painting showing figures seated in four rows of church pews with classic stain glass windows and the latter an elderly gentleman biting into a slice of watermelon with some of its juice dripping onto a white plate below – a scene taking place outside a church where the congregation shares after mass. There is stillness and an easeful unfolding outdoors and indoors, at a Sunday barbeque in "Finally", in the farm landscape in "Already Home", or in seemingly ambiguous environments with human portraits, like the guitar player strumming in front of a bookshelf in "120,300 Pennies", in the portraits "Don’t Call Me Sweetheart" and "Sweetwater" or in the car scenes in “G.L.C. Gerald Leroy Colas" and "Li te mete sa li te vle (She Wore What She Wanted)".