Gabrielle Goliath, Bearing, Galleria Raffaella Cortese.
With Bearing, presented at Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Gabrielle Goliath brings a project that explores presence, vulnerability and bodily memory to Milan. This project fits coherently within the South African artist’s wider practice, which has long examined the dynamics of representation and the forms of presence available to marginalised bodies. Here, her visual language takes on a more intimate and contemplative dimension, entrusting drawing with the ability to create a shared space for visual contemplation. Soft surfaces, open contours and layered tonalities produce images that demand attention — they insist upon it. The decolonial body does not ask to be explained or translated into recognisable categories. It is present, moving through space and demanding a different way of looking. Goliath creates images that seek not validation or confirmation, but existence itself: figures inhabiting the pictorial surface with radical stillness and resisting any urgency to be defined. By the end of the exhibition, one question remains: how much of our gaze is still driven by the impulse to define, name, and above all possess what we encounter? To what extent are we still shaped by a Western, Eurocentric perspective?