Chila Burman selects LUAP’s Light And Warmth for Bring Your Light, the Bow Open 2023 at Bow Arts. The Painting explores fire as a source of warmth, connection and psychological calm through LUAP’s longstanding fascination with the hypnotic movement of flame.
Fire has always held a particular pull for LUAP. It gives warmth, cooks food and has long been something people gather around for conversation, shared time or simply sitting quietly together. It can also be deeply private. Watching a flame shift and change can become almost hypnotic, narrowing attention until the noise of everything else begins to fall away.
That feeling sits at the centre of Light And Warmth. For LUAP, staring into an open fire creates a rare moment of stillness. The changing light draws the eye in, the flame dances and worries begin to recede as attention becomes absorbed by its movement.
The Painting places The Pink Bear beside a fire within a dark wooded landscape. Light radiates out from the flame while the surrounding darkness recedes. Rather than removing what surrounds it, the fire changes the experience of being there, creating a temporary space for warmth, thought and reflection.
This connects naturally with the wider concerns of The Unconscious Therapy, where LUAP explores nature, memory and psychological experience. Particular environments and sensory experiences can alter our internal state, sometimes through very simple actions. In Light And Warmth, sitting beside a fire becomes one of those moments.
The movement of the flame also carries into the Painting itself. Areas of recognisable landscape give way to looser abstraction, where the paint becomes more gestural and fluid. The marks appear to dance with the changing light, allowing the act of Painting to echo the hypnotic quality of watching a fire.
Created in 2021, Light And Warmth is a 124 × 183 cm Oil and Acrylic Painting on Ply. Chila Burman includes the work in the Bow Open 2023, titled Bring Your Light, where its relationship with warmth, reflection and connection finds a natural place within the exhibition.
Presented at Bow Arts, the exhibition brings the work into a wider conversation about what we offer to those around us. For LUAP, that light begins with something elemental. A flame, a moment of stillness and the ability to find a little peace within it.
