In his studio practice Pierre Vermeulen explores the contemporary votive, as a symbolic object of regulation. Using the ex-voto as an entry point, he considers its latent qualities of transactional fulfilment and externalisation of crisis, and redirects the power of this objectness towards desire. Drawing on Jungian psychoanalysis, Vermeulen has developed a unique visual language for expressing core themes of the unconscious structure and realisation of the self, through his own imaginative system of archetypes. While Vermeulen's use of the ex-voto may not reference the fulfilment of a vow, it is retrospective, implying a story. Like a relic, like a saint’s bone, it becomes a site of offering. Similarly, the heat-eaten surfaces of his works in gold leaf, imprinted and eroded by the chemistry of his body, communicate an aftermath – an act recorded on an enduring form. Oxidisation becomes containment, a force held in place so it does not devour the subject. This new body of work intensifies that condition. Psychic charge is transferred into objects that absorb, organise, and stabilise the charge. Repetition becomes compulsion: push further, hold longer, remain. The phrase Deeper - Deeper operates as mantra and command, moving between physical training, erotic insistence, and psychological descent. Throughout the exhibition, cast elements of the body and ambiguous forms appear within systems that resist immediate recognition. What first reads as chaos reveals an underlying order. In one painting, these votives are arranged in a triangular grid that both contains and fails to contain them, clustering in zones of heightened intensity. Points of intersection become charged, as if something unseen is passing between the forms. Their binary natures – left / right, male / female, mineral / corporeal, Apollonian / Dionysian – are regulated by a complex predictability, not dominated by one or the other, and further equalised by a universalising white finish. In parallel works, the same monochromatic treatment is applied in silver. While real gold signifies permanence, a forever untarnished surface, silver remains exposed, reactive to time. In using imitation gold and silver leaf (which are actually composites of other metals - zinc and copper for gold, aluminium for silver) Vermeulen reverses their responses to touch. More importantly, in this collection of works, they become representative of a psychological polarity: the conscious and unconscious. Gold is symbolically solar, the sweat prints represent heat, the body. Silver is lunar, full of votive offerings to unseen forces and unconscious projection. At the heart of the exhibition, two large scale imitation gold leaf pieces show the residue of the artist’s own body, covered in sweat and pressed onto the susceptible alloyed surface in various positions. In the first, the full figure is repeated until it saturates the surface. The imprints resist identification – age and individuality dissolves, but the evidence of exertion remains. Sweat accumulates, pooling into topographies of pressure and contact, flesh becomes terrain. The grid of gold leaf binds it and desire is knotted into geometry. In the second, isolated limbs cohere into the illusion of a human skull. A reminder, not of death, but of limit. Beyond the individual, it becomes representative of civilisation – coherent from afar, but up close it’s just individual bodies arranged into something. Modern culture imagines that desire can be managed. The body and its ensuing chaos – excreting, sweating, shedding – becomes symbolic of desire. We impose structure onto it through routine, ritual, exercise. But desire does not obey these structures. It accumulates, intensifies, seeks rupture, until there is dissolution and a new order must emerge. George Bataille recognised this threshold: the point at which the individual is no longer sovereign, and excess must be expended ritually, creatively – or risk catastrophic release. Vermeulen’s work inhabits that threshold. It does not confess, or resolve. It operates at the level of the archetypal, where the body is no longer personal, but universal – where desire is not narrated, but encountered as force. There is no closure, only the continued insistence. Deeper. Deeper.