Stand Close and Breathe Me In is a group exhibition of paintings which explores thecollective spirit of small scale imagery within the context of a painting-viewer relationship.These paintings draw you in. They initiate an intimate response and engage the viewer inthe act of looking. They arrest us at close quarters via the smallest of painterly activities anddevices.Each painting punctuates the next and radiates into the space and into each other. Theyconverse and mingle, sending out messages like invisible rays. They enter the bodythrough the eyes and remain there as propositions, questions and after-images.These paintings remind us that ‘size isn’t everything’. Up close, we’re able to scrutinisecontent and the manner in which the paintings were made. We experience the surface as aconsequence of process, feeling each painting’s meaning through its distinctive mode ofmaking.At a distance, we witness the bigger picture, where the paintings converse silently at armslength, collaborating as dots and dashes and through repetition and strength in numbers.Approaching these paintings they begin to reveal and conceal themselves simultaneously.Clarity is administered in their obscurity and abstraction before we back away to achieve asense of perspective in the collective.