Summoning Cleo
Mia Middleton
Roberts Projects
"...whoever wants to go to God through sweetness and consolation is deceived."
— Saint Catherine of Bologna, The Seven Spiritual Weapons
There is a figure at the centre of this body of work who never appears. Cleo is not depicted but summoned, a centrifugal force whose presence organises the paintings without being contained by any of them. She stands for what can't be held: the raw force of life caught in a web of modern survival; innocence and idealism perpetually on the threshold of arrival. Her name gives the show its incantatory logic. To summon is to call forth, to conjure, to compel appearance, and also, in a different key, to be called before power.
The paintings that comprise Summoning Cleo draw on early photography’s peculiar relationship to truth. There is a fragility in these images, a sense that what is being recorded is both constructed and irretrievably real: time capsules carrying gestures and atmospheres forward from another world's logic. From picture into presence, images begin to slip out of their original context, reappearing within a dystopian, discordant world. Many of the figures are sourced from photographs found at flea markets or early theatre archives, and having arrived already estranged, are then transmuted onto the canvas as figments of a spectral future.
Each figure is in a state of suspension or interruption, neither fully intentional nor entirely involuntary. Each gesture functions as a precursor or residue: the endless instant before something happens, or the aftermath of fever, the body caught mid-spell. "The theatre takes gestures and pushes them as far as they will go," Artaud wrote, and this is the landscape these works inhabit, not theatrical in the sense of spectacle, but in the sense of maximum pressure applied to a single physical instant. Subjects are treated as archetypes rather than depictions: semiotic arrangements where force operates on and through forms.
Against this atmosphere, miasmic scenes assemble a corrupted fairytale. The forces in tension are not abstract. Villains appear: a faceless figure under a wide-brimmed hat swallowed by shadow; a man whose eye has been replaced by a coin; a monolith embedded in a romantic landscape, the machinery of domination wrapped in the veneer of the sublime. These forms do not menace through action but through presence, embodying the systems of surveillance, instrumentalisation, and attrition in which vitality finds itself ensnared. Alongside them, counter-measures hold their ground. Figures join hands against the night. Hands cover a face, equally legible as grief or protection. A red rabbit leaps suspended against silk. A nest cradles a blood red egg. These elements do not oppose the villains so much as persist in their presence, as though life itself were an act of defiance.
The palette moves between deep theatrical reds and archival greys, each carrying its own charge. The reds are feverish, warm, alive with latent force. The greys are historic, faded, eerily nostalgic. Together they describe the two registers of the show: the bloodstream of force moving forward, and the flickers of presence caught within it. Neither resolves the other. The paintings hold this tension in place rather than releasing it, and a transmutation, improbably, continues.
Exhibition opens Saturday 19th September, 2026