oliver bancroft
the golden loop
7.05 - 30.05.2026
The Golden Loop
The Film Gallery is pleased to present The Golden Loop, an exhibition of new paintings, drawings, and film installations by British artist and filmmaker OLIVER BANCROFT. This marks Bancroft's first solo show with the gallery, as well as his first ever in Paris.Mr Patel’s Golden Head
An extract from a 2012 sketchbook, the artefact remaining from a life-threatening episode in an ICU hospital ward. Consisting of drawings and notes made from the bedside of Jon, who had been hospitalised due to the development of an infection in his brain space. Day by day this infection was growing in Jon’s skull, causing the decoupling of his mind and body. Jon was slipping into the unconsciousness of a coma. His awareness of his surroundings was disappearing, he was becoming a ghost in his own body. Added to this was the strange fact that Jon had ‘predicted’ this event. One of his schizophrenic delusions was that he had a disease in his head and that he was infecting others and they did not know it.
Does the act of drawing from observation create a protect sense of stoic calmness? A method to help cope with the shock and/or distress of a situation. The sketchbook documents the act, repeated over and over again, of looking and drawing Jon lying there. As if the repetition of this act was an attempt to comprehend the event in all its details—‘to make it true’. Drawing the situation brings a clarity, the sense of being present and observant. These pages show the process of drawing as a means of engaging with the situation without being thrown into the dilemmas of ongoing events. Focus on the details, like how he holds the pipe of his oxygen mask while connected to all the ICU machines.
On other pages there are drawings from the imagination, created between hospital visiting hours. Like storyboards for an imagined film, turning the protagonist into a superhero / supernatural-like character. The measured markings made for brain surgery become cyberpunk-like tribal markings or messages.
The sketchbook is exhibited in a variety of ways: a projected 16mm film of fingers shuffling back and forth through the pages, its looped presentation emphasising the repetition of the act of drawing; the original sketchbook displayed as a historical art object; and a ‘facsimile’ riso print of the sketchbook, to be held in the hand of the viewer. These different formats are brought together by an audio recording of the artist recounting the events surrounding the sketchbook.
SUPPLY CHAIN
Downriver from my studio the Thames passes by the town of Erith. Wide open space, long horizontal edges of the river surface, the air and light taking on those estuarine properties. Here the Thames is becoming the sea. At Erith I experienced what I can only call a vision, something that has since driven an obsession to see it again and capture it on film and in paint. Returning time and again to the same spot, attempting to match the conditions—the tides, the light, the weather and the position of the boats—in the hope that the equation would align again and reveal the vision once more. My continual return to that space with a camera… the filming of that moment.
In my first encounter with the vision, this location appeared uncanny and familiar, like I had seen it depicted before—a watercolour painting by J.M.W.Turner. Was it the same sun-drenched vision that he beheld and made real 100s of years ago? the same barges? the same wide tidal space of the river?
The film installation generates a perpetual moment, not frozen but extended beyond the time of its actual capture: an endless twilight. As if the twilight seen by Turner had never left. The light captured here goes on and on.
The accompanying paintings are attempts to depict the vision clearly, keeping the mind’s eye open to paint what was seen. Not only to convey the Turner-like painting made real but also to portray what I had seen surfacing in the estuarine twilight, the eerie presence of the supply chain. These golden dark barges, pseudopod-like limbs of the global supply chain. The estuarine landscape punctured by a gilded node of this serpentine entity that appears in the same way, in countless twilights at countless locations, all around the planet.
–Oliver Bancroft, 2026