Scene XI: a world of dew, A Conversation in Paint with Abbie Horberry and Aaron Kudi

Matt Carey-Williams, Sandy Lane, Wiltshire, May 2025

The world of dew is, yes,
a world of dew,
but even so

Kobayashi Issa, “a world of dew” (c. 1813-16).

CHAPTER I: TRANSIENCE

Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828) – a lay Buddhist priest of the Jodo Shinshu – is regarded as one of the four haiku masters in Japan. Issa is celebrated for his phonemic brevity; his haikus encouraging an efflorescence of the most perfumed yet elastic imagery – pregnant with possibility – but always through a choreography of the most simple and direct language. Issa’s life was plagued by sorrow - all but one of his five children died in infancy and his first wife died in childbirth - and he wrote his celebrated haiku, a world of dew, following the deaths of a son and daughter in quick succession. It is a poem that unveils an unambiguous yet profoundly touching observation about the transience of life whilst still affirming and confirming the dynamo of life’s purpose and endeavour. It is this conversation between the ephemeral and the experiential; between moments savoured, lost, but then remembered that sits at the heart of Issa’s haiku and which, as energy (if not script) chimes so neatly with the searching paintings of Aaron Kudi and Abbie Horberry.

Issa’s haiku begins with a statement and then reiteration of the existence of “a world of dew”. Dew being that morning gloss clinging to and varnishing the ground as frozen night slowly stretches into the warmth of the day: a moment of misty, almost mystical shimmer that lasts but an hour or so before it evaporates into the light. Issa’s dewy world is thus a space of impermanence, yet this ephemerality is cross-examined in the haiku’s third line – “but even so” – forcing the reader to acknowledge that whilst this world – our world – is a transient one, it still exists, albeit temporarily. This is the moment(s) we all live for. Issa sets up both the distinction yet synchronicity between the inexorable condensation of life and those moments that suspend our inchoate vacuum, filling life momentarily with the dash and brio of physicality and emotion. It is a telling conversation elegantly achieved with a text (in translation) made up of just ten different words (the longest of which has just five letters). Only with such plain, minimal text, phrased so modestly, can Issa empower us to contemplate the passing of time; its sadness but also the joy it briefly sparks.

Horberry and Kudi’s enterprises find a connection with Issa’s concise yet malleable haiku, hovering over the impermanence of life and the meaning such ineluctable transience invests into the labyrinth of our shared experience. Both these abstract painters make surfaces that ebb and flow in and out of mark and mechanic, assuming then subsuming states of being, becoming and beyond, at times announcing paint in dialects geological, biological and even otherworldly. Like Issa’s haiku, their chosen media may be simple and some if its application may be direct, but their orchestration of it – and the many tributaries of meanings that flow from such arrangements – is deeply textured. Out of less flows more: a sophistication etched across Horberry and Kudi’s painted surfaces that touches on the untouchable, elevates everyday experience into the temples of myth and element, and which seeks to distil moments of miasma into matter as these two painters revel in their achingly beautiful worlds of dew.

CHAPTER II: EARTH

Horberry and Kudi’s conversation begins in the earth; a place where minds are pressed on the nature and notion of terrain, mark, ground, space and their painterly execution. Even as both painters create surfaces that palpate with possibility, heaving between forms molecular or cosmic; glacial or volcanic, their work shares an interest in communicating the complexities of space. Not just to evince environment or, indeed, inveigh against any formal configuration, but to allow space to inhale and exhale; to morph between ooze and structure whilst offering trails of its past - as both object and ‘scape – as they articulate their ballets of abstraction.

Abbie Horberry, Traces of Cailleach, 2025, Oil on canvas, 113 x 70 cm (44 1/2 x 27 1/2 in)

Even before her brush has begun to excavate any sense of territory, Horberry has – like the alchemist – transformed the ground upon which she works. Canvas is deliberately and vigorously crumpled by the artist; an energetic intervention that invests into her now corrugated surface tiny rifts and valleys that seek to trap, (re)direct and discombobulate the paint she subsequently applies. Before she paints, however, she meddles further with her canvas by dying it: a process that amplifies the disturbances she has made; her inks seeping deep into the ground, tattooing folds into scars, alienating surface materially and chromatically. We see this very clearly in the ensanguined surface of Traces of Cailleach (2025): its ruby ground gives way to a craquelure of aubergine that then gathers into tiny, murderous pools; their darkness pushing back against the ground’s bubbling, pale incandescence. This very physical process allows Horberry to mould her ground, empowering it to capture smear, spill and stain so that her first communion with the earth mandates a certain kind of mapped phenomenology. One born from the artist’s intuition as a painter, her encouraged accidentality and results in her ever-present, ever-conscious act that celebrates improvisation as much as it interrogates and tries to control it.

Kudi’s painting also tangoes between objection and abdication; between the intent of his mark and his own embrace of chance to (re)guide it. Horberry’s initial interventions with the ground act as the foundation for her painterly negotiation with chance whereas Kudi’s experimentation with it – practically and conceptually - manifests itself in different ways. He first layers plumes of paint onto his canvas; immediate, emotional marks that are curiously bold yet quiet, eager yet delicate, and which engender a supple structure on to which he then builds up his surface. Each return to the surface sees the artist employ a slightly different painterly strategy. His initial lightness of touch becomes increasingly more urgent with each approach to the ground becoming denser and more emphatic. It is at this point that Kudi begins to engage the spirits of chance which, in turns, begins another tectonic upheaval of the painted ground. He distresses (or, rather, re-addresses) his surface by pooling paint directly onto the canvas and then, in concert with gravity and by physically moving his support, he lets paint run free and arrive at its own destination. From there Kudi will, again, approach the canvas with another method of application – smearing not brushing, diluting with water (by hand and with rain from the sky) not embellishing with further paint. Earth is thus formulated by a series of painterly contests, both with itself as medium but also with the intangible or unknown.

Aaron Kudi, Oration on The Dignity of Man, 2025, Oil, pigment, house paint, gold leaf, liquid metal, oil stick and jesmonite on canvas, Total dimensions: 182.9 x 365.8 cm (72 x 144 in), Individual dimensions: 182.9 x 182.9 cm (72 x 72 in)

This strategy is gloriously divulged in Kudi’s monumental, opulent diptych, Oration on The Dignity of Man (2025). It is a painting that began as a blizzard of rosy whites but, over time, becomes a heated compression of bloody reds, fleshy pinks and metallic golds and silvers – painted, poured and thrown, consciously and unconsciously – and all accented with minty green darts that fly across the tectonic turmoil below like fleeing birds. Kudi’s earth is now less worldly terrain than it is a primordial soup announcing the beginning of time. Earth no longer envisioned as a place or destination but as a cypher or journey; a multi-dimensional, mythical space that recounts being and memory together. A space that seeks to push earth to its physical limit before it transforms into the amoebic ornamentation of the ethereal or spiritual. Kudi’s title here is also telling. The painting is named after Pico della Mirandola’s famous public discourse, written in 1486, that attempted to map out a (then) landscape of human capacity and achievement. At the heart of the Italian Renaissance lies human faculty – the fact of it and the quest for richer veins of it – and that landscape (as idea and aspiration) sits neatly with Kudi’s craft and concept as a painter given that his is a practice that seeks to explore and evince the success of one mark or one boundary only to push and mould it into another, further electrified gesture. Painting, like knowledge, like Pico’s take on humanity, like the spirit for some and the earth for us all, being realms that grow because of the catalysts provided by human endeavour, curiosity and ambition.

Kudi manages to bind presence with timelessness which is why his painted surfaces so easily drift from earthly to ethereal. Horberry, however, seems further fixed on notes of the earth and landscape. She does not let her ground wander off so easily into Kudi’s Byzantine light of spirit and otherness, neither does she ask paint to glissade into the drier arabesques of timeless evanescence we see in Kudi’s paintings. Even if Horberry’s palette is equally magmatic in Traces of Cailleach, her surface remains controlled, the result of a slower, more meditative approach to painting. The craft, at first an apocalyptic disruption and then a kind of archaeological dig to isolate its survivors, now becomes an intimate act of stitching or healing. Across her berry surface Horberry makes tiny synaptic flashes – with line and mark; with paint and support - forming an interconnectedness across the painting. That fabric of nexus is, as her title suggests, born from her love of her Scottish Highland homeland and by her desire to immerse herself (and her viewer) in that place. Colour, whilst strange and discordant, pays homage to the heather of her homeland so that which would seem to disturb the truth or hegemony of the earth does, in fact, celebrate it. Landscape here betrays space and even place but, importantly, the direct connection it has with the artist: a space born of rupture but held together by the most considered, exquisite craft, transporting the terroir of place into a mosaic of memories.

CHAPTER III: WIND

Aaron Kudi, Quattro Stagioni Runs, 2025, Oil and house paint on canvas, 121.9 x 167.6 cm (48 x 66 in)

Wind offers flux, cloudy obfuscation and the air of mystery yet also speaks of freedom and propulsion. Both Horberry and Kudi create worlds where such tempest and dissipation sit alongside one another, harmonising and antagonising in equal measure. Amidst a maelstrom of drips and splashes, erasures and redefinitions, Kudi’s Quattro Stagioni Runs (2025) proposes a surface that never quite catches up with itself. Space builds into registration only to bleed into opacity. Figures appear to occupy what looks like a beach, suggested by Kudi’s sunny orange ground, yet they are never able to stand that ground, their deliquescence accelerated by the artist’s tumbling scumbles of white made even more fragile by the juxtaposition of darker passages of bruised plum tones encroaching in from the perimeter of the painting, as if about to strike. Chaos abounds and yet the viewer takes comfort knowing that peace resides within such tumult, uttered by the fleeting silhouette of a dissolving presence or the momentary adumbration of a stage upon which we know something that matters will eventually occur.

Once again, Kudi’s title transports the viewer to several different readings of his work. The ‘four seasons’ he names here refer to Antonio Vivaldi’s four violin concerti: a piece of music he listened to whilst creating this painting. Interestingly, the surface betrays aspects of all four of the seasons: the freshness of Spring; the light of Summer; the developing darkness of Autumn and, finally, the cascading snowfall of Winter. All these seasons are captured by Kudi’s inquisitive brush dancing across the canvas in swift, lyrical gestures that simultaneously create and destroy, validate and deny. Music and literature remain an enormous influence on the artist. From Vivaldi to Nina Simone to the Ethiopian nun, Sister Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, music feeds the artist’s hand by pushing him to search for those spaces or moments that rest outside of liminality, beyond the boundaries of ordinary illumination. Kudi’s quest is to absorb the physical to such an extent that, in the sweet breeze of mystery, the spiritual or divine will eventually reveal itself, not as a note but as a hum.

Abbie Horberry, Veins, 2025, Oil on canvas, 30 x 30 cm (11 3/4 x 11 3/4 in)

Horberry’s Veins (2025) offer a more tempestuous wind. Frenzied swirls of greens and oxidized reds engage in a battle purloined from the annals of Futurism or the École de Paris. Such is the tempo of the wind here that Horberry’s ground implodes in on itself with her canvas splintering into threads that arc across the surface or ruffle together at the lower right corner, as if to batten down the hatches. If the wind soothes with sublime suggestion in Kudi’s Quattro Stagioni Runs then, here, its violence runs wild across a ‘scape so intensely battered that it coalesces into pure abstraction. Only the wind remains.

This small but determined painting powerfully displays Horberry’s desire to elicit what Immanuel Kant called ‘purposiveness without purpose’. So abstract, so mellifluous has the artist’s surface become that the viewer has no way to know how to enter or exit space which, in turn, nourishes the status of the painting not just as an phenomenological object – a thing simply to be seen and not read - but also fuels the process which endeavours to determine such impalpability of discourse or narrative (but not meaning). The goal is to simply sail on the wind for the sheer joy of doing so and to let the rendition of that flight and flux sit outside of any confines provided by empiricism or objectivity. This is the freedom which Horberry displays in her paintings – the engine of her enterprise – and which gives her the permission to delight in the inchoate ambiguity of life without any need to determine the sanctity of place or person.

CHAPTER IV: FIRE

Abbie Horberry, Aether, 2025, Oil on canvas, 120 x 100 cm (47 1/4 x 39 3/8 in)

The conversation continues in the heat of the fire. That arena of aureate light and fanciful celebration but also of feverish contest and the torment of Hades, fire signifies the belly of the earth’s mantle; the passion of the heart; the transportation of the soul from Earth to Heaven. Horberry’s Aether (2025), however, only shows the embers of a fire about to go out – the sun about to go down or the last radiation of a star in a far-off galaxy. Heat is cooled to passages of papal purples, made cooler still by the nebulae of blue marks that float around the ground like ghosts. The wrinkles of the surface – perhaps a distant planet’s scars or the capillaries under your skin – also serve to contain this fire, offering cohesion through, ironically, a haphazard stream of lines that, in effect, function like a stream of consciousness: a thought process that, much like Horberry’s surface, eschews dimension or perspective and privileges an intertwined entanglement of mark and moment.

The Polaris fire that offers the light to guide the artist and their viewer home burns gently within Horberry’s composition. Nonetheless, it is a light that illuminates the interconnectedness of her surface - the painted mark on the dyed ground enlivened by the meandering threads given by itself - but which also allows her surface to swell and slough between macro panoramas and snippets of quantum litotes. The light energises this ongoing contradistinction, allowing Horberry’s surface to remain free enough to assume any number of planar or perceptual positions. This, in turn, further feeds the flux of the wind; the flux generated by seeing insects under a microscope or the moon through a telescope is akin to looking at a painting by Horberry. It’s a flux that transforms known into unknown, that abstracts reality, that ultimately offers the viewer a map – not an atlas – to freefall into the very essence of Issa’s dewdrop. That moment of utter clarity followed by the silence of memory and longing.

Aaron Kudi, Untitled 222, 2025, Oil, pigment, house paint, gold leaf, liquid metal, oil stick and jesmonite on canvas, 167.6 x 167.6 cm (66 x 66 in)

Kudi’s fire burns brighter, but issues no less mystery. Oranges, reds and golds blaze across his canvas like a Grecian sunset, the shapes of these colours connecting more vigorously with each other than before, as if their heated desire to synthesise adds another level of tension to Kudi’s composition. Untitled 222 (2025) at first glisters with a Byzantine lustre, suffused as it is with deep wells of thick, luxurious gold (the alchemist’s goal) radiating not just wealth and power but enlightenment and even spiritual transformation. These flourishing, gilded expanses are then slowly surrounded by a deep mulberry, encroaching on their shine like a hostile virus, surrounding and thus condensing, even blemishing the colour and its various signification. Kudi tests colour, much as he does form, gesture and ground, not just in juxtaposition or contradistinction but in genuine dialogue, so that a tessellation of subliminal drives and emotions comes together, voiced by chroma, to form – if not shape – a kind of narrative. An age-old, mythic tale or - as is the case here - a rumination on the simplest yet most powerful emotions we as humans share with each other: love. The fire that burns so brightly offers the light of love, which Kudi emphasises by giving his painting the angel number of 222, signifying love, balance and harmony. Love, like Kudi’s composition, which is arrived at only after a series of challenges, testing space, ground, colour and emotion.

CHAPTER V: WATER

Aaron Kudi, Telemachus Second Act, 2025, Oil paint, house paint, gold leaf and oil stick on canvas, 152.4 x 121.9 cm (60 x 48 in)

The sea flows through Homer’s Odyssey like blood through veins, symbolising the passage of time, endurance and the instability of life. Water is both curse and champion for the returning Odysseus and it also articulates the desire for truth and the need for fulfilment of his son, Telemachus. Kudi’s Telemachus’ Second Act (2025) is directly influenced by Homer’s epic poem and, specifically, with the acts of Telemachus: the first being to ensure news of his father’s fate be made clear to his mother, Penelope, by allowing the bard to sing of the Trojan War. The second being Telemachus’ galvanisation, preparing to journey to find his father after being visited by the goddess of wisdom and strategic warfare, Athena. His first act seeks authority; his second act takes control.

Kudi’s painting certainly displays the artist’s mature handling of paint, yet it also continues to betray the delicious struggle all painters have when trying to control it. His blooming, volcanic ground is, once again, empowered to form itself so that the artist achieves artistic authority by ironically relinquishing nearly all his control over the management of his surface. So it is that a diaphanous, aqueous verticality streams down this composition, itself suggestive of the flow of water but, here, those striations are then additionally gilded and that crucial act somehow invests those marks with a figurative, anthropomorphic zing. Out of the fire in the earth and through the tempest, water now comes to further challenge Kudi’s surface but now also lend life to, at least, a figural or spiritual hieroglyph. Perhaps we see whispers of Athena on the left (dressed as Prince Mentes) advising Telemachus on the right to banish his mother’s suitors and go off and find Odysseus. Perhaps the tiny swathes of deep blue that penetrate Kudi’s usual incarnadine ground signify both sky and sea and thus both the challenges he faces and his destiny to meet and beat those challenges.

Abbie Horberry, Salao, 2025, Oil on canvas, 220 x 140 cm (86 5/8 x 55 1/8 in)

Water swims around Horberry’s Salao (2025) in delectable agitation with her typically amorphous yet correlative ground offering waves on a turbulent ocean in an orchestra of blues, pale lilacs and whites. Once again, her painted rivulets unite with yet resist against her corrugated, stained ground, their action – as dictated by the artist – intuitive and even automatic. More than any other work by Horberry, Salao embraces an approach to painting that mirrors the stream-of-consciousness writing found in novels such as Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea (1952) or Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva (1973). Hemingway employed the sea to differentiate between known and unknown – the conscious and subconscious - but also to mark the oscillation between the two. So it is that Horberry’s ground peaks and troughs between marks knowingly executed and those that seem to execute themselves. Her task being the orchestration and interconnection of the two.

The influence of Hemingway on Horberry runs deep and particularly so in Salao. The title means ‘very unlucky’ in Spanish slang and Hemingway uses it as the beginning of The Old Man and The Sea to describe Santiago’s lack of fortune, having not caught a fish for the past 84 days. As already noted, chance and luck play their part in Horberry’s enterprise at her invitation, much in the same way that luck – or the lack thereof – does in Hemingway’s novella. However, fate, resilience and hope also permeate both Hemingway’s text and Horberry’s painted surface, and it is that shared defiance – of mark over ground; of motion over form; of (wo)man over the elements – that weaves its way through their synergy, articulated by the acuity of word and gesture as they revel in the immensity and mystery of otherness.

CHAPTER VI: PERMANENCE

Issa’s ‘world of dew’ may envision life as a brief Augenblick but it reminds us that our experience of life, no matter how limited, is an experience worth having and one which records both our existence and our ambition for it. Impermanence and ambiguity thus ultimately give way to the elemental intimacy and knowledge that only life – being alive – can engender. This is why the four elements of earth, wind, fire and water offer the most suitable theatres in which to stage the drama of Abbie Horberry and Aaron Kudi’s conversation in and with paint.

Issa’s haiku, however, goes further than simply distinguishing between a life lived and lost. “… but even so” not only validates the enterprise of life, clipped as it so sadly is, but also suggests that experience could continue after one has had their final dance. It is a hope imbued in the grief that nourished his poem. Issa merely alludes to an ‘other’ plane or frame of possible illumination in the most economic manner, but the intention is clear. That ‘otherness’ speaks so clearly to the art of these two young painters. It manifests itself in moments where the flux of their abstraction morphs, just for a moment, into a fixed presence. Where the dynamo of their painterly antagonism and contradistinction suddenly effloresces into the calm of congruity. It sits in their shared embrace of luck and chance, deliberately divesting themselves as authors to amplify their authority over their process and thus work.

The silence of Issa’s ‘but even so’ lingers at the end of the haiku, drifting off into myriad realms of possibility. Likewise, this is where Horberry and Kudi transport their viewers. Not to a known place or to a familiar figure but to a space that lingers, like memories or dreams. These are surfaces that function like streams-of-consciousness, with paint ebbing and flowing in and out of itself to hint to some form of registration only to annul any such palpability. Perhaps, in the final analysis, their knowing denial of materiality marks the beginning of their efforts to propose whispers of that which is immaterial. A god? A spirit? A philosophy? An emotion? The fusion of all four, perhaps? Therein lies both the quest and oxymoron of their conversation in paint. By engaging with the ferocity of the elements that so signify earthly territory, human experience, and the travails of the two, they both manage to unveil some of the mysteries of life. The order in our chaos. Our ‘self’ in an ‘other’. The spirit in our Nature.

Matt Carey-Williams
Sandy Lane, Wiltshire
11-14 May 2025