Integral Thresholds: Lara Julian In Conversation With Chrissy Moore

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Aro
Stand in the Light
Acrylic on canvas
46 x 46 cm

As London's autumn season gathers - and before Frieze draws the city into its high pitch - artist and curator Lara Julian and advisor Chrissy Moore sit at Binghatti in Knightsbridge, during the exhibition Integral Thresholds. Around them the rooms are already at work: stone, glass, two floors of measured light, and paintings placed so that architecture and colour occupy the same climate.

Julian, born in Siberia and based in London, is a colour technologist as much as a painter. Trained at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Slade School of Fine Art, she treats pigment as matter and force, building vertical fields in which looking is asked to slow down. For Integral Thresholds she is both exhibiting artist and curator: the intelligence that decided how one work may approach another.

Moore is founder of Chrissy Moore Art Advisory, an independent, woman-led practice shaped by auction-house years in Edinburgh and Sydney, Museum Studies, and further study at Sotheby's Institute of Art. She works as a bridge between artists and collectors, insisting on transparency, due diligence and long relationships rather than spectacle. The exhibition is presented by her advisory with Binghatti and Belli International Real Estate.

Read it for the grain of a collaboration still in motion: two practices meeting inside the rooms they have made together, before the season gathers its usual velocity, and asking what selection, hospitality and shared attention can leave in their wake. Both speak; both inquire.

Lara Julian

Chrissy, before we talk about hanging and rooms, I want to start with the practice itself. You built Chrissy Moore Art Advisory as an independent, woman-led studio after years in auction houses in Edinburgh and Sydney, Museum Studies, and further study at Sotheby's Institute. What are you actually doing day to day - and what made independence necessary?

Chrissy Moore

Day to day I am a bridge. I work with artists who are committed to their practice and with collectors who want a path that is transparent rather than theatrical. The advisory is built on integrity, insight and impact. Institutions taught me a great deal - how a market moves, how a room is read, how due diligence protects everyone in the conversation - but I wanted something more flexible, where artists and collectors feel supported, not processed.

Independence lets me stay close to the work. I look for artists who enjoy the labour of making, who are open to collaboration, and who will stand beside me as part of a team. That sounds simple. It is not. The art world still rewards noise. I am more interested in stewardship.

Caroline Boff
Dreams
Acrylic and Mixed media on canvas
50 x 41 cm

Lara

Why this project, then? Why bring a group of contemporary artists into Binghatti's Knightsbridge space, with Belli International, at the opening of the season - just as London begins to turn toward Frieze?

Chrissy

Because the season should begin with looking, not only with traffic. Frieze concentrates the world in a few days. That intensity is valuable, but it can flatten attention. A project of this kind, placed in a building that already understands material, proportion and light, offers another tempo: slower, more architectural, more human.

Binghatti's showroom is generous in volume and composed across two floors with a calm authority. Stone and glass hold the light as architecture is meant to hold it. Belli International understands that a room is not finished when the stone is laid. Contemporary art changes the character of a space. It also changes the people who walk through it. I wanted collectors, guests and the artists themselves to meet one another in a setting that is neither a fair booth nor a conventional white cube - a living interior, at the start of the season, before the calendar becomes a blur.

It is important because access still matters. Too much of the ecosystem still feels gatekept. If we can make the path more navigable - for an emerging painter and for a first-time collector - then the project has already done more than announce a hanging.

Lara

How did you choose the artists? Aro, Caroline Boff, Steven Cox, Emma Coyle, Francesco Ruspoli - and then my own work inside a show I was also asked to shape.

Chrissy

I start with commitment. I want painters who are inside their language, not performing a trend. Aro brings a concentrated clarity - Stand in the Light does what the title promises: it does not decorate a room; it asks the room to receive light. Caroline Boff's Dreams holds an interior weather without illustration. Steven Cox's Nothing Gold Can Stay has that rare combination of surface built by accumulation and a title that is both warning and tenderness. Emma Coyle's Celebration 2 steadies a hanging with graphic intelligence - a different tempo, which a group needs. Francesco Ruspoli's Social Harmony introduces a human interval: relation, not slogan.

And you. I asked you not only because your paintings treat colour as matter and force, but because you think like a curator while you paint. That is uncommon. I needed someone who could hear the building as well as the canvases.

Steven Cox
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Oil on Canvas
76 x 61 cm

Chrissy

Which brings me to you. When I invited you to curate Integral Thresholds, what did you understand the task to be?

Lara

Hospitality. An exhibition is a symphony for quiet contemplation: an invitation to look slowly, and to give each painting the conditions in which it may be fully met. Curation is the quiet work of attention - of deciding how light should fall, how one work may approach another, how a room might open rather than merely contain. The character of an experience depends upon it.

Art and architecture create a single ecosystem. The exhibition should not sit in Binghatti's rooms so much as unfold with them, as if a complete universe had been set quietly down upon another planet, and filled, with great care, with life. Names can assemble an occasion. Only care can assemble an experience.

Chrissy

You wrote that we walk through the installation as a river passes through a landscape. How does that river move?

Lara

The ground floor receives us first. Aro and Steven Cox set the opening tone: paintings warm and considered, surfaces built until matter itself seems to hold the light. Then the staircase - which is not a corridor but a change of register - brings us to Unfolding Expansion, where colour is built in vertical measure, the surface holding the gravity and splendour of paint as matter. From there the first floor opens as if one had stepped onto a quieter Olympus: elevated, lucid, and strangely at home.

On that floor the works stand in clusters, as one might group voices in a chamber work. Non-representational fields stand in considered relation to representational and figurative painting, not as opposing camps but as complementary languages. Each work is asked only this: to stand clearly, and to breathe. Interval is part of the composition. The space around a painting is the air in which the work can sound.

Colour leads us through the whole as an inner continuity. Hue answers hue, temperature answers temperature, and the eye is drawn onward almost without noticing the guidance. When that sequence is true, the senses begin to gather. Looking lengthens. The rooms acquire a rhythm. One has the curious feeling of hearing music.

The works stand on light, almost invisible supports, so that each canvas occupies the space as a presence. Further artists from the programme appear, at the close, on a single large digital screen - another threshold, not an afterthought.

Chrissy

Let us stay with the paintings. Astral Night and Matter and Trace sit in a different climate from Cox or Coyle. What are they doing in this company?

Lara

They are offering temperature.

Astral Night stages night as a physical condition - violet, ultramarine, magenta, with raised dark points that sit like solidified shadows. It does not illustrate darkness. It gives darkness density, and then lets residual light travel the ridges. In a season that will soon be full of spectacle, a nocturne is a form of resistance. It asks for a slower eye.

Matter and Trace is the counter-field: reds and oranges in sculptural channels, with cooler depths flickering through. The title is the argument. Matter is the weight of pigment - viscosity, heat, the capacity to hold light. Trace is what remains of every gesture, every veil, every decision not fully erased. From a distance it reads as radiant heat. Close to, something quieter appears in the gaps.

Unfolding Expansion, on the stair, is the hinge: a cool field in which a central pressure begins to open without rupture. Expansion here is not a display of force. It is a held unfolding. Together the three works give the building a climate - nocturne, fire, and opening - so that Boff, Coyle, Ruspoli, Aro and Cox are not asked to compete with a single abstract weather. They enter a weather that already knows difference.

Emma Coyle
Celebration 2
Acrylic on canvas
76 x 61 cm

Lara

You have said that platforms such as Artsy have made discovery global. Does a physical project in Knightsbridge still matter in that landscape?

Chrissy

More than ever. The online market is no longer supplementary; it is central to how collectors discover, research and acquire. That is useful. It is not sufficient. A screen cannot grant a painting the patience of changing light. It cannot give you the interval between two works, or the way stone returns a colour to the eye. Binghatti's rooms allow that. The digital screen at the close of the hanging is a way of admitting both truths at once: the world is larger than one building, and a building can still teach us how to look.

What sets the advisory apart, I hope, is that pairing - art-world care with a serious respect for trust, documentation and the long relationship. A project at the start of the season should plant those relationships, not exhaust them before October.

Francesco Ruspoli
Social Harmony
Oil on Canvas
61 x 71 cm

Chrissy

Then I will leave you the last word. What do you want a visitor to take from this collaboration - and what should they do next?

Lara

I want them to leave with a restored courtesy: the willingness to remain with a work long enough for it to unfold. Curation is the stewardship of looking. A painting deserves duration. A visitor deserves a path through which seeing may become something more than recognition. If the senses gather, if looking lengthens, if someone has the curious feeling of hearing music in a room of stone and glass, then the collaboration has done its first work.

Lara Julian
Unfolding Expansion
130 × 120 cm
Oil and acrylic on coarse linen
2024–2026

What I do not want is a closed ending. Integral Thresholds is a beginning - a way of opening the season before Frieze gathers the city into its high pitch. Colour, as Klee wrote, is the place where our brain and the universe meet. That meeting is not finished in one hanging. It continues in the studio, in the next conversation between artist and advisor, in the next room that is willing to host looking with care.

Lara Julian
Astral Night
110 × 80 cm
Oil on coarse linen
2026

So my call is simple. Stay with the work. Follow the news of this collaboration as it grows. There are further projects already taking shape for the year ahead - new hangings, new conversations, new thresholds. The season has started. Let us not rush past it. Let us remain long enough for the next thing to become visible.

Lara Julian
Matter and Trace
120 × 100 cm
Oil on primed coarse linen
2024-2026

Interview conducted for USA Art News during Integral Thresholds at Binghatti, Knightsbridge, London.

Exhibition curated by Lara Julian and presented by Chrissy Moore Art Advisory with Binghatti and Belli International Real Estate.

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