Blind at The Age of Four, London, 2023

Jack Warne invites us into the flickering moments of a world revealed. A journey where our perceptions of the virtual and the real are brought into question, our trust in digital technology is interrogated and our reliance on the visual expanded into the bodily.

Inspired greatly by his archival collection of family video tapes, Warne’s new body of work is an opportunity to reflect on memory and childhood archetypes. Layering painting, print and newer technology to help disrupt our neural pathways, Warne reduces the image to its materiality, piecing these associated frames back into a digital painting that is neither signal nor noise.

The show’s title ‘Blind at The Age of Four’ references in part the rare genetic eye condition Thiel-Behnke Corneal Dystrophy which Warne inherited from his late father, a condition that can plunge Warne into periods of complete darkness. In these moments Warne experiments with music to restore his calm. This exhibition follows his debut album of the same name released last month under the moniker GAUNT. Displaced soundscapes from this album are activated by interacting with the artworks.

This exhibition seeks to encourage a more palpable, multi-linguistic and inclusive engagement with the artworks. There is a tactile path on the floor that can be felt through shoes and tapped with a cane, and a co-created audio-guide devised with members of both the blind and sighted community. Newly commissioned poetic responses to Warne’s artwork have been written by poet Ella Frears. As the basement of the gallery is not accessible to wheelchair users, the artist has devised a parallel exhibition experience via a virtual artwork that can be accessed from the ground floor. Each painting is accompanied by a digital counterpart that can be accessed through a QR code printed onto facsimiles of letters from a son to his parents, which Warne found in an antiques shop.

Throughout the show the virtual and actual are blurred; moving phones to map the paintings, the visitor’s gestures occupy and become part of the mercurial artworks as new virtual parts of Warne’s work come into focus. We are invited to interrogate the threshold of our own perception and our memories, and to explore how technology and machines can aid as well as hinder our everyday reality.