“ANTECHAMBER” JAMIU AGBOKE & ELLI ANTONIOU

Jamiu Agboke & Elli Antoniou
Antechamber
6 June – 4 July

Cob is pleased to present Antechamber, a duo exhibition bringing into dialogue new works by Elli
Antoniou and Jamiu Agboke. Across painting, metallic drawing, and charcoal drawing, the exhibition
unfolds as a constellation of atmospheres: intimate zones of perception shaped through light, material
and spatial rhythm. Moving between the sacred and the secular, the works emerge like moments
of private revelation – suspended scenes illuminated with near-devotional intensity, where matter
becomes radiant and architecture itself begins to dissolve.

Rather than approaching landscape as image or site, both artists engage it as a shifting field of
sensation and attentiveness: something encountered gradually through rhythm, memory, luminosity
and material behaviour. Their works operate like fragments of a larger continuum, capturing fleeting
states that hover between appearance and disappearance, recognition and obscurity. Horizons drift,
forms remain provisional and compositions seem held within an ongoing process of becoming.
Nothing settles entirely. Instead, viewers are drawn into spaces that feel simultaneously vast and
intimate, where perception itself becomes unstable and heightened.

Central to both practices is an act of listening. Surfaces do not simply receive images but guide the
rhythm of their own formation. Copper, aluminium, charcoal, wood veneer and reflective metallic planes
each carry their own internal logic, resistance and velocity. Rather than imposing fixed structures onto
these materials, Antoniou and Agboke work responsively, allowing atmospheres to emerge through
repetition, submission and sustained attention. Meaning gathers slowly and relationally, as though
the image is not constructed but revealed – something accessed intuitively before words, formulas or
reason.

A spiritual undercurrent moves throughout the exhibition, though never through direct symbolism
or narrative. Instead, the works approach perception itself as a devotional condition: embodied,
instinctive and quietly transformative. Light functions almost sculpturally, isolating individual works
like beacons or shrines within the gallery’s dimmed architecture. Encounters unfold through glimmers,
reflections and partial illuminations that recall the heightened theatricality of Baroque sculpture or the
concentrated beams of light found deep within caves and sacred sites. Time appears suspended within
these environments. The ordinary physical coordinates of the gallery begin to dissolve, replaced by a
sensation of weightlessness, equilibrium and subtle disorientation – as though viewers have entered a
liminal state between atmospheres.

This spatial sensibility unfolds across two architecturally separated floors of the gallery. Rather than
functioning as discrete sections, the spaces operate as two coexistent atmospheric states held in
gravitational relation to one another. The upper floor, populated by Agboke’s works, explores energies
that exist above the surface: luminosity, weather, tidal movement and the unstable conditions of
orientation. Below, Antoniou’s works move beneath the membrane, tracing subterranean and bodily
forces that permeate material space from within. Together, the two atmospheres exist in dynamic
equilibrium, continuously affecting and recalibrating one another across the architecture of the
exhibition.

For Antoniou, landscape exists as an ecosystem in perpetual metamorphosis, inseparable from bodily
and cosmic experience. Metallic surfaces, charcoal fields and fragmented mountain forms become
dispersed sensory events stretched across duration. Influenced by the fluid spatial sensibility of Shan
Shui painting traditions, her recurring mountain motifs function less as destinations than as unstable
temporal markers – distances that shift continuously between intimacy and enormity, memory and
mirage. Vertical gestures recur throughout the works like translucent veils, simultaneously obscuring
and revealing while invoking gravity as an invisible force shaping all experience.

Her continued exploration of the intercom works extend this language of thresholds further,
transforming familiar architectural interfaces into speculative portals between realities. References
to lifts, devotional shrines and Athenian apartment infrastructures collapse distinctions between
transcendence and the everyday, dream states and material presence. Throughout her practice, metal
is treated not as fixed industrial matter but as something capable of becoming immaterial – reflective
surfaces dissolving solidity into atmosphere, light and perceptual flux.

Agboke similarly approaches painting as a process of attunement rather than depiction. Informed
by Yoruba cosmological thought and the relational logic of Ifá divination, his works understand
meaning as something that emerges gradually through alignment, repetition and embodied attention.
In Bearing, the sea becomes less a subject than an atmospheric condition: a space of orientation,
carrying, surrender and continual transformation. Horizons dissolve and reform while forms appear
only momentarily before receding back into surface and light.

Informing Agboke’s paintings’ is a sensitivity to weather, shifting luminosity and tidal movement.
Copper and aluminium surfaces respond differently to pressure and process, revealing themselves
selectively and often withholding full visibility. Through this choreography of reflection and opacity,
Agboke constructs environments that feel contemplative, cosmic and suspended outside ordinary
time. His works remain in a continual state of emergence, occupying the threshold between material
presence and disappearance.

Together, Antoniou and Agboke create an exhibition grounded in meditative attention to the fleeting
and unstable nature of perception. The gallery itself becomes a mutable landscape activated by
movement, shadow and changing intensity – a terrain navigated through gradients of brightness and
obscurity. Each work functions as a threshold: a quiet gravitational pull drawing viewers into altered
states of attentiveness and sensation. Even at their most composed, the works never feel static. Instead,
they hold us within the suspended cusp between one state and another – between immersion

Antechamber: Jamiu Agboke & Elli Antoniou
6 June – 4 July 2026

Cob Gallery
84a Lamb’s Conduit Street
London
WC1N 3LT

*Ellie Antoniou is a visual arts ARTWORKS Fellow