Laughing Twice
Henry Gibbs
Rebecca Willing
July 9 - August 9
2025
Henry Gibbs
Rebecca Willing
July 9 - August 9
2025
Flexitron is pleased to present Laughing Twice, a duo show of work by Henry Gibbs and Rebecca Willing
Doubt multiplies when there is no clear way of choosing one thing over another, or reducing something to a singular form. It undercuts any justification for decision-making, instead giving way to contemplation, conflict, and capitulation to dilemmas of visual language.
The works in Laughing Twice consider the multilayered implications of the “double” through mark making and painterly gestures that give chance to discrepancy and divergence. There is always something new and unforeseen that emerges from repetition: difference. Attempts to contemplate a painting or drawing’s singularity - through repetition, manipulation, and ambiguity - are undone by the inevitable and infinite plurality of a gesture. The “double” resists a fixed identity, operating instead as a metaphorical device for navigating intricate relationships between mind and body; eye and hand; the mechanical and embodied.
Both artists hide, distort, and fragment imagery through various forms of translation to reflect expression, perceptions of identity and the elusive nature of our relationships with digital networks and systems. These digitised gestures create shadows, rhythms, and variations that haunt aspects of the self and online expression. Mapping the process of image to painting - and painting back to image - generates a sense of disembodied multiplicity as repetitive paint marks are mechanically translated into drawings. Surfaces become gestural archives holding records of layering, editing, and material translations.
The deceptiveness of these marks - drawn, erased or layered - emerges through a rendering of ordinary digital processes almost suggesting a superficiality and mundanity, complicating their legibility of expression. Language and gesture simultaneously confirm and complicate what we think we see, as they shift between digital and physical formats. In this relentless renewal of an action, mark-making is doubled and repeated, fatigued and residual in representations of communication.
Rebecca Willing’s work thinks in pulses, repetitions, ruptures and flows - the rhythm of contemporary life mediated through screens.
Scrolling through your photos is like riding a compressed timeline of years, moments and peaks and troughs, simultaneously coexisting and colliding. You create this rhythm of movement along with your device. In this dance between human and screen, eyes are not just passive receptors. They conduct the tempo of attention. As you scroll, your eyes modulate their tempo; bodily reactions to the weight of what is seen.
Your gaze aligns with the tempo of the screen, that familiar surrender to the device’s rhythm. You enact a repeated motion; look, scroll, pause, look, scroll, pause. The backbeat of your thumb’s movement across the screen leads this rhythm. The eye performs a quiet choreography, moving left to right and returning again, tracking the changes between rows and columns as this digital landscape unfolds.
Each image has its own rhythm, a staccato of moments and the occasional long, slow breath of stillness. Your eyes are measuring and marking the cadence of this archive. There’s syncopation: the sharp jolt of a photo you weren’t expecting - a mouth from years ago that stops your thumb mid-scroll. Some images pull your eyes into loops and folds, held in a kind of visual echo. Others are skimmed over - empty screenshots and accidental downloads - and the rhythm breaks and reforms. You rest for a moment and there is silence whilst your eyes hover in that space between photos. In these pauses, the framework of your attention is revealed.
In contrast, Henry Gibb’s works Face hook 1 and Face hook 2 emerge from manipulations of a photographic series of self portraits taken outside the flats of men he has met up with across London. Shot several years ago, they now serve as a reference blurring the lines between concealment and revelation. Through digital reproduction, the faces are lost in translation, simultaneously screaming, laughing, yawning or in shock, where moments of misrecognition create an unreliability in emotional expression. In reference to psycho-digital effects on our perceptions of self, aspects of simulated traumas take form through destructive gesture and (digital) shadows.
Questioning forms of expression through painting and gesture, the strokes and blurs are loaded with singular marks that become intertwined with digital and physical impressions from the half-toned image. They act as an almost incomplete codification of visual communication, like a gestural exoskeleton or x-ray. These distortions are full of tricks and signifiers that highlight the troubling ambiguities of how we relate and engage; how information is received and processed can reveal the boundaries of self and emotional expression.
Repetition of action and blurred gestures concentrate moments of fatigue and bleakness, emphasising the negation of expression that are misinterpreted then reinterpreted - considering the reality and sub-reality of how we communicate. A powerful, painterly gesture becomes nothing but the sublimation of faked expression. So perhaps the initial act of gesture becomes anti-gesture becomes love of gesture becomes disseminated.
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1. Henry Gibbs, Face Hook 2, 120cm x 90cm, Graphite, Charcoal and Gesso on Canvas, 2025
2. Henry Gibbs, Face Hook 1, 120cm x 90cm, Graphite, Charcoal and Gesso on Canvas, 2025
3. Rebecca Willing, Flatland, Oil and Pencil on Paper, Aluminium Frame, 68cm x 100cm
4. Rebecca Willing, Score, Ink, Oil and Pencil on Paper in Aluminium Frame, 62cm x 100cm
Biographies:
Henry Gibbs
Henry Gibbs (b.2000) lives and works in London. He completed a BA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins (2023). Selected group exhibitions include: ‘LAS Invites’, London Art Services, London (2025); Generally Assembly (2024); ‘First Edition’, Collective Ending, (2023); ’Now Introducing’, Studio West, London (2023), ‘Next’, Christies (2023); ‘Between the Bridge and the Door’, Pictorum Gallery, London (2023); ‘Meltdown’, Ridley Road Project Space, London (2022). Henry completed the Goodeye Projects Residency, London in 2022 and completed a painting commission for Canary Wharf in 2024 to enter as part of their permanent public art collection.
Rebecca Willing
Rebecca Willing (b.1999) lives and works in London. She earned her BA from Central Saint Martins in 2023, where she was awarded the Cass Art Prize. In 2024, Rebecca completed ‘The Drawing Year,’ a postgraduate scholarship program at The Royal Drawing School. Her work has been featured in several exhibitions, including Recurrence, ASC Gallery, London (2025); Best of The Drawing Year, Christie’s, London (2024); Luminous Presence, Here and Gone, ColArt Headquarters, London (2022); and Having a Coke With You, The Cookhouse Gallery, London (2021).
Doubt multiplies when there is no clear way of choosing one thing over another, or reducing something to a singular form. It undercuts any justification for decision-making, instead giving way to contemplation, conflict, and capitulation to dilemmas of visual language.
The works in Laughing Twice consider the multilayered implications of the “double” through mark making and painterly gestures that give chance to discrepancy and divergence. There is always something new and unforeseen that emerges from repetition: difference. Attempts to contemplate a painting or drawing’s singularity - through repetition, manipulation, and ambiguity - are undone by the inevitable and infinite plurality of a gesture. The “double” resists a fixed identity, operating instead as a metaphorical device for navigating intricate relationships between mind and body; eye and hand; the mechanical and embodied.
Both artists hide, distort, and fragment imagery through various forms of translation to reflect expression, perceptions of identity and the elusive nature of our relationships with digital networks and systems. These digitised gestures create shadows, rhythms, and variations that haunt aspects of the self and online expression. Mapping the process of image to painting - and painting back to image - generates a sense of disembodied multiplicity as repetitive paint marks are mechanically translated into drawings. Surfaces become gestural archives holding records of layering, editing, and material translations.
The deceptiveness of these marks - drawn, erased or layered - emerges through a rendering of ordinary digital processes almost suggesting a superficiality and mundanity, complicating their legibility of expression. Language and gesture simultaneously confirm and complicate what we think we see, as they shift between digital and physical formats. In this relentless renewal of an action, mark-making is doubled and repeated, fatigued and residual in representations of communication.
________
Rebecca Willing’s work thinks in pulses, repetitions, ruptures and flows - the rhythm of contemporary life mediated through screens.
Scrolling through your photos is like riding a compressed timeline of years, moments and peaks and troughs, simultaneously coexisting and colliding. You create this rhythm of movement along with your device. In this dance between human and screen, eyes are not just passive receptors. They conduct the tempo of attention. As you scroll, your eyes modulate their tempo; bodily reactions to the weight of what is seen.
Your gaze aligns with the tempo of the screen, that familiar surrender to the device’s rhythm. You enact a repeated motion; look, scroll, pause, look, scroll, pause. The backbeat of your thumb’s movement across the screen leads this rhythm. The eye performs a quiet choreography, moving left to right and returning again, tracking the changes between rows and columns as this digital landscape unfolds.
Each image has its own rhythm, a staccato of moments and the occasional long, slow breath of stillness. Your eyes are measuring and marking the cadence of this archive. There’s syncopation: the sharp jolt of a photo you weren’t expecting - a mouth from years ago that stops your thumb mid-scroll. Some images pull your eyes into loops and folds, held in a kind of visual echo. Others are skimmed over - empty screenshots and accidental downloads - and the rhythm breaks and reforms. You rest for a moment and there is silence whilst your eyes hover in that space between photos. In these pauses, the framework of your attention is revealed.
In contrast, Henry Gibb’s works Face hook 1 and Face hook 2 emerge from manipulations of a photographic series of self portraits taken outside the flats of men he has met up with across London. Shot several years ago, they now serve as a reference blurring the lines between concealment and revelation. Through digital reproduction, the faces are lost in translation, simultaneously screaming, laughing, yawning or in shock, where moments of misrecognition create an unreliability in emotional expression. In reference to psycho-digital effects on our perceptions of self, aspects of simulated traumas take form through destructive gesture and (digital) shadows.
Questioning forms of expression through painting and gesture, the strokes and blurs are loaded with singular marks that become intertwined with digital and physical impressions from the half-toned image. They act as an almost incomplete codification of visual communication, like a gestural exoskeleton or x-ray. These distortions are full of tricks and signifiers that highlight the troubling ambiguities of how we relate and engage; how information is received and processed can reveal the boundaries of self and emotional expression.
Repetition of action and blurred gestures concentrate moments of fatigue and bleakness, emphasising the negation of expression that are misinterpreted then reinterpreted - considering the reality and sub-reality of how we communicate. A powerful, painterly gesture becomes nothing but the sublimation of faked expression. So perhaps the initial act of gesture becomes anti-gesture becomes love of gesture becomes disseminated.
1. Henry Gibbs, Face Hook 2, 120cm x 90cm, Graphite, Charcoal and Gesso on Canvas, 2025
2. Henry Gibbs, Face Hook 1, 120cm x 90cm, Graphite, Charcoal and Gesso on Canvas, 2025
3. Rebecca Willing, Flatland, Oil and Pencil on Paper, Aluminium Frame, 68cm x 100cm
4. Rebecca Willing, Score, Ink, Oil and Pencil on Paper in Aluminium Frame, 62cm x 100cm
Biographies:
Henry Gibbs
Henry Gibbs (b.2000) lives and works in London. He completed a BA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins (2023). Selected group exhibitions include: ‘LAS Invites’, London Art Services, London (2025); Generally Assembly (2024); ‘First Edition’, Collective Ending, (2023); ’Now Introducing’, Studio West, London (2023), ‘Next’, Christies (2023); ‘Between the Bridge and the Door’, Pictorum Gallery, London (2023); ‘Meltdown’, Ridley Road Project Space, London (2022). Henry completed the Goodeye Projects Residency, London in 2022 and completed a painting commission for Canary Wharf in 2024 to enter as part of their permanent public art collection.
Rebecca Willing
Rebecca Willing (b.1999) lives and works in London. She earned her BA from Central Saint Martins in 2023, where she was awarded the Cass Art Prize. In 2024, Rebecca completed ‘The Drawing Year,’ a postgraduate scholarship program at The Royal Drawing School. Her work has been featured in several exhibitions, including Recurrence, ASC Gallery, London (2025); Best of The Drawing Year, Christie’s, London (2024); Luminous Presence, Here and Gone, ColArt Headquarters, London (2022); and Having a Coke With You, The Cookhouse Gallery, London (2021).