If a skeleton provides the internal architecture, what then is the exoskeleton?

The exoskeleton is a hardened exterior, the protective shell that mediates between interior essence and external world. In nature, the exoskeleton is both armour and interface, a boundary that defines the relationship between self and environment. Stokes’ presentation for Art SG extends the inquiry begun in Skeleton (2024), pushing further into the paradoxes that emerge when painting, once championed by Greenberg as the ultimate flat object, becomes a physical entity increasingly encountered through the glowing flatness of a screen.

There is a particular irony at play here: the Greenbergian insistence on painting’s essential flatness, its rejection of illusionistic depth in favour of honest two-dimensionality, now finds itself reversed in the digital age. The painting, that most stubbornly physical of objects, is routinely mediated, flattened again but this time into pixels, its materiality compressed into light. The question is no longer whether painting can acknowledge its flatness, but whether it can assert its physicality at all.

The exhibition establishes a conversation between extremes of materiality. Translucent silk works, suspended and permeable, allow light to pass through them, their surfaces shifting with ambient conditions. Against these, dense metal pieces anchor the space with their weight and opacity. Central to the presentation is the suspended installation Provisional Sculpture (2025), which extends this inquiry into three dimensions as a study in mass and volume. A suspended rock hovers atop its glass relation; yet what is being tested here? Balance, weight, material interaction certainly, but perhaps also the fragility of perception itself. A reflective plinth anchors the work below, offering an alternative perspective through its surface, leaving open the question of where the work truly resides: in the objects themselves, in their precarious arrangement, or in the space between matter and its reflection.