Audiovisual
09 May 2025 – 31 May 2025
Opening reception: Thursday, May 08, 6–8:30pm
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Sébastien Bertrand is pleased to introduce Audiovisual, a solo exhibition that introduces Isaac Soh Fujita Howell’s (1993, USA) work for the first time at the gallery.
Evoking a shadowy narrative stitched loosely across canvases, Howell’s figures appear to be participants in a cryptic, seemingly clandestine operation—spying through mechanical peepholes and ultra-zoom cameras, wielding bizarre, speculative listening devices, or frozen in moments of quiet complicity. Though their tools may look familiar, they’re distorted just enough to suggest an alternate timeline: a world imagined before the rise of smartphones but still haunted by a deep technological anxiety.
The exhibition, composed of five acrylic paintings and three drawings, takes its title from the dual channels through which modern perception flows—sound and image—and suggests the discomforting gaps that form between them. The works avoid specificity: stiff figures undistinguishable from one another, uncertain timelines, deliberately nonspecific locations. “I’ve been trying to make my paintings look like they belong to a past vision of the near future in a world without smartphones,” Howell explains.
Inspired in part by films like The Lives of Others and the unstable narratives of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Howell’s paintings hover between nostalgia and dystopia, intimacy and estrangement. Titles provide subtle cues, referencing both literary and real-world surveillance culture, while never fully anchoring the viewer in a knowable reality. La Jalousie and Voyeur are nods to Robbe-Grillet’s writing, while Stingray refers to surveillance equipment often used by American intelligentsia.
Through these ambiguous images, Audiovisual reflects on the artist’s own questions about self-isolation, technology, and the fragile ways in which people attempt to connect—often through the very screens and devices that mediate them into further distance.
Isaac Soh Fujita Howell, Stingray, 2024-2025
Acrylic on canvas, 91.4 x 61 cm. / 36 x 24 in. (IFH-2504)
Isaac Soh Fujita Howell, Standard Frequency 2, 2025
Watercolor and pen on paper, 30.5 x 22.9 cm. / 12 x 9 in. (IFH-2508)
“I was thinking of contemporary issues similar to before - general paranoia around the political apparatus, and the malaise of self-isolationism as people try to figure out how to exist with new and uncertain technologies. I'm certainly not exempt from this problem - I think most artists spend too much time alone, and on their phones, and I think sounds and images consumption are naturally how they try to connect outwards.” – Isaac Soh Fujita Howell
Audiovisual transforms these tensions into a visual language that is stiff, elegant, and persistently elusive—challenging viewers to consider how we watch, listen, and remain unseen.
2025
Watercolor and pen on paper
22.9 x 31.8 cm. / 9 x 12 ½ in.
IFH-2503