CTRL_ABSENCE, Skygolpe at Fellowship, London

CTRL_ABSENCE is Skygolpe’s new solo exhibition, presented in the Fellowship gallery spaces in London from 20 to 26 November 2025. The project consists of 21 unique video works and four Baryta paper prints (70×50 cm), arranged along a path that connects two levels of the exhibition space. The show examines our relationship with images, identity, and the threshold between presence and absence as it relates to artistic practice.

The silhouette, a distinctive and recurring element in Skygolpe’s digital works, reappears here as a constant presence in the physical prints as well. In every piece on display, the anonymous figure, stripped of identity and central to the artist’s ongoing research, becomes a neutral, universal form that does not depict but rather evokes.

The artist describes this element as an existential symbol, a condition to inhabit. In this suspended figure, the viewer is invited to recognize themselves.

To reach the creative process behind CTRL_ABSENCE, Skygolpe moves through different media and materials: from the urban photographs taken during his early years in London over twenty years ago to more recent ones, from discarded objects and debris to the painterly textures of his canvases, and eventually to digital manipulation and artificial intelligence. Everything is brought together in a continuous flow and in a technique, if it can be called that, that merges these different media into an ongoing, open-ended process within his practice.

The video works on the upper floor unfold in a continuous space where the images mentioned earlier float, break apart, and reassemble in loops orchestrated through movements generated by AI software.

Their timing shifts between accelerated moments and suspended intervals, creating a vision without a fixed center, made instead of voids, accumulations, and subtractions.

Within this stream of digital collages, the combination of elements generates a visual landscape in constant transformation.

Next to the two large central LED screens, four 70×50 prints expand the physical and material dimension, creating a bridge between the viewer’s bodily presence and the intangible quality of the moving images displayed alongside them.

CTRL_ABSENCE is, ultimately, a visual anthropology built around the image of the silhouette, inviting us not to look at the other, but at the emptiness that continually inhabits us as human beings.

-FW