NARRATIVAS: Where Colour Carries the Weight of Memory
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By The Urgency of Art Team
Jul 2026 Issue 18
12 min read
NARRATIVAS: Where Colour Carries the Weight of Memory
There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a room when a group of artists agree, without saying so, to speak in the same register. NARRATIVAS, presented in London by CM Art Advisory and The Pavilion, is built on that unspoken agreement. The show gathers a set of practices rooted in the Global South — Peru, Panama, Chile, and the wider diaspora that now calls London home and lets them share a single language: colour, used not as decoration but as grammar.
That framing matters more than it first appears. London’s exhibition calendar is not short of colour, but it is often short of colour that carries something. Here, pigment does the work that narration usually does elsewhere. It sets rhythm, holds tension, and — most persistently across these rooms — stands in for memory. The artists are not painting places so much as painting the residue of places: the light of a coastline, the pattern of a domestic object, the palette of a childhood that a passport can no longer return you to.
Andrés Silva makes this explicit. His birds, rendered in watercolour with the patience of natural-history illustration, are never only birds; they perch on the freight of migration, desire, and the friction of urban life. A starling balanced on a tin of Tiger Balm is a small, precise joke about how identities travel — and about what gets carried across borders when a body moves. The effect is tender rather than didactic, which is exactly why it lands.
Nelson Hernández works the same terrain from the opposite direction. Where Silva accumulates, Hernández erodes. His canvases take the canonical images of art history and the throwaway images of popular culture and let them dissolve into one another, until it is no longer clear which was ever “local” and which was imported. It is a sharp diagnosis of globalisation’s flattening effect, made without a raised voice.
The Peruvian-born practice of Elke and Karin Hanspach shifts the conversation into the domestic and the tactile. Their ceramic forms — warm, organic, low-fired — read as vessels in every sense: containers for resilience, for transformation, for the idea of home reconstructed at a distance. Placed among the paintings, they insist that memory is not only visual but held in the hand.
Bissy Riva, moving between London and Nairobi, brings the exhibition its most physically restless surfaces, folding fabric and pattern into oil until the picture plane behaves like a body under feeling. And VOLCAN closes the loop conceptually, reconfiguring archival imagery to ask how belonging is constructed — and regulated — in a world where every identity is now mediated, layered, and endlessly exposed.
What holds these five positions together is not a shared style; their methods diverge sharply. It is a shared refusal to treat migration and hybridity as subject matter to be illustrated. Instead, displacement is treated as a formal condition something that shapes how the work is made, not merely what it depicts. That is the more interesting proposition, and NARRATIVAS is at its strongest when it trusts it.
The show also quietly makes a case that London’s institutions are still slow to make on their own: that the city’s most vital narrative work is increasingly being done by artists whose frame of reference sits well outside the Anglo-American centre. An art advisory and a wine house from Chile have, between them, put those voices in a room. That the market got there first is worth noting and worth watching, as more of these narratives push toward the parts of the art world that have been slowest to listen.
In a quieter, more symbolic register, Hanan Shakir's The Black Sun (acrylic and mixed media on canvas) sets a palm tree as a hinge between memory and presence – its simplified form poised against a black sun and birds, the curve of the trunk and sweep of the fronds carrying the eye toward a central light. The palm anchors the composition as a living, enduring presence, linking place, time and perception.
Alongside them, Natalie Dee, Phil Dunn, Freddy McBride, Moritz Nicolai, Iliana Ortega-Alcázar, Jan Pimblett, Kathy Rooney, Luke Anthony Rooney, Hanan Shakir and Carolyn Murphy complete the ten-strong line-up — a collective that, true to its name, is most itself when its strands are tangled.
Information
NARRATIVAS features Bissy Riva, Elke & Karin Hanspach, Andrés Silva, Nelson Hernández, and VOLCAN.
Coverage by The Urgency of Art Magazine.