For almost 40 years, self-taught artist Eugene Carchesio has been creating music, small-scale watercolours and cardboard constructions that stimulate curiosity and quiet contemplation. Operating with a minimal and considered aesthetic, Carchesio’s artworks are primarily concerned with figurative and abstract presentations of form and energy. Carchesio explores these tropes through formal devices such as colour theory, geometric abstraction, patterning and a suite of repeated visual motifs. Employing humble materials such as paper ephemera, packaging and matchboxes, Carchesio draws our attention to the beauty and simplicity of the insignificant. 

The Ventriloquist (vol.2) features 21 intimate watercolours of birds coupled with formal abstractions. The artist eschews taxonomy in favour of hybridity, drawing from the colouration and coverings of multiple species to create a final composition. Subsequently, the accompanying geometric abstractions indicate an allegiance to the formal qualities of these compositions. An understanding of the interaction between each abstraction is intuitively re-enforced by the figuration, as each bird appears to exist playfully in space with the abstractions.