Exhibition
Standing Room Only - Flowers (Kingsland Road)
The tradition of portraiture offers us many heavenly bodies; sublimely twisted torsos adorned with carefully choreographed symbolic semaphores; bodies upon which beauty, sovereignty and majesty of history are writ large. The portraits exhibited here confront this tradition in a full frontal attack, precluding aesthetic distance and disinterested contemplation by demanding a human-scale encounter with their viewer.
In many of the works, both symbolism and subjectivity are condensed into shadow. A statuesque woman, lips and dress stained the colour of wine, cloth clinging to her confident figure, spilling into a sanguine pool beneath her, is haunted by a shadow that snakes genie-like from her body; a plume of vapour threatening to engulf her. A young girl dressed in the same carmine hue, face prematurely drawn and hair dishevelled, meets the viewer face-on in an unnerving wordless entreaty. Her shadow, like her juvenile frame, is willowy, faint and incongruous against her black setting; shooting out from under her feet in broken shards of half-light. A ‘Man with a View’ chooses to turn away from his a brilliant vista, folding into his own shadow as he directs his gaze on the viewer, drawing the shutters on his window to the world.
