Hidden Messages by the Skye Brothers

Addicted Art Gallery presents a new series of provocative work by the SKYE BROTHERS.

The first thing you need to know is: colour. All paintings in the series are rendered in black, white and gold, but every artwork is different. Examining the duality of life (black and white), and the role of the divine (gold), the Skye Brothers take a penetrating look at the stories we tell ourselves, and the truth that lies beneath them, through their unwavering monochromatic and metallic lens. Masterfully executed in layers that are added to or revealed, their paintings are beckoning us to explore what’s being covered up and what’s hiding in plain sight.

The Skye Brothers are as sweet as they are shocking. Made up of pop culture disruptors slash part-time poets, brothers Liam and Noah are here to make us choose what matters. And they’ll just keep on encouraging us to choose right until their dying breath so you may as well listen: “It’s not that we need a wake-up call, it’s about noticing what we’re waking up to. The world is in chaos for people every day, but in every moment we stand on it there is the capacity for heaven on earth.”

All at once, their artworks are giving us a good shaking while we’re being stroked, to see what will make us sit up and take notice. But there’s no message to share. The Skye Brothers want us to generate our own. “We’re not here to give you meaning. As soon as you give something a definition you’re side-tracked; you’re missing everything else. Sometimes it’s not about taking things too seriously and just being right now. The simplest things are the purest. That’s divine.”

Like the devices used in a Brechtian play, the almost invisible phrases buried in the canvas as matte paint plays against gloss, or the starkly handwritten statements that proclaim themselves in the artwork, the audience is being distracted with titles and labels, so they don’t dive too deep in their emotional response. Instead, they’re being invited to practice some reflective detachment; a more constructive mindset from which to gather the intel on our souls and make changes we need.

Noah and Liam work in a symbiosis that makes their work alive, even when it’s finished and hanging on a wall. Working in unspoken union, they complete work energetically, moving around and responding to what each other has created on the canvas, practising the detachment required in knowing that someone might paint over what you’ve created. And that it might be a little bit – not better or worse, just different – for it. “The continuous process of destruction and creation that we undertake – you just learn to let go. The beauty is in the flow.”