Artist Dalia Minou

Curated by Olivia Tegli

Online exhibition — opened 13 July 2023, ongoing

There is a traditional French children’s toy known as a culbuto: a small, rounded figure with a weighted base that cannot remain overturned. Push it and it tilts, sways and circles around its centre before slowly returning to an upright position. Its apparent instability conceals a precise internal balance. The outside reveals nothing; the explanation lies within, in a hidden weight placed low and slightly off-centre.

As a child, Dalia Minou was not reassured by this movement. She was troubled by it. Something invisible seemed to govern the toy, repeatedly restoring its balance without revealing how. She never really stopped asking what held it in place.

This series of watercolours is what that question looks like when it ceases to be a question and becomes a method of painting. Each work carries a visible centre of gravity: a dark, dense accumulation of pigment, drawn together and deepened, heavier than everything around it. You see it immediately and think: there it is. Then the surrounding forms — soft, rounded, transparent and without a single hard edge — begin to move. Or rather, you realise that they were always moving. The centre holds, but it does not fix. It tilts the entire composition into a slow, continuous swing.

Minou does not compose these paintings so much as enter their physics. She places a mark, a weight appears, the softer forms respond and the whole image begins to sway. She cannot stop it simply by deciding to stop. The painting comes to rest only when the movement quietens on its own. What remains is not a resolved image, but a moment of stillness between one movement and the next.

Neverland is not a place that cannot be reached. It is a state that cannot be held — always after one swing and always before another. The centre is there, dark and certain, but the form refuses to let it become fixed. Like the French culbuto, it returns, and returns, and returns. Not because it wants to, but because that is what it was built to do.

The exhibition exists online by choice rather than circumstance. These works have always been concerned with distance — with the gap between seeing something and fully grasping it. A screen does not diminish that distance. It becomes the distance itself. You look at the dark weight at the centre of each painting and know that something is there. You simply cannot quite reach it from here.

Which is, of course, the point.