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Latest items? Unedited? Fringe Report Uncut
Exhibition - Holly Lucas
Verdict: Stunning portraits by a remarkable artist
London - Indo - 9-27 September 03
Indo, 133 Whitechapel Road, E1 1DT, tel 020 7247 4926. Mon-Sat 12noon-11pm. Sun 12noon-10.30pm.
This first exhibition by painter Holly Lucas presents 3 portraits, two nudes, and a set of studies.
There are 6 studies, around 9"x6", the remaining canvases are approx 30"x40". All are oils, all the large canvases are in landscape format except one (noted below).
Man In Bed. There's a post-coital feel (though the bed looks a bit small), and what looks like a backwards erection (no, it's his foot) in this sensual painting. The folds of linen are rendered with a magnificent sensuality subtly underscoring the passion implied by the subject. There's a resonance of Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat (1793, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels) to this powerful look at human abandon (and the mess it can make of a well-made bed).
Portrait - Man With Shaved Head. There's classic theatrical lighting to this striking face, presented in three-quarter profile. A single key-light bounces off the forehead, the edge of the profile contrasted against a light patch of wall. It's composed in the way of a cinema edit: comfortably at screen-left, leaving screen-right ready for a cut to a following actor. The face at left is balanced by a sloping roof and mysteriously illuminated column to the right. It's a happy face, with great liquid eyes and frankly delineated features, and belongs to Neil Retnam, co-owner of the exhibition space.
Portrait - Man At Bar There's a fine, sensually-portrayed mouth at the focus of this remarkable painting. The face is rendered in a way that suggests passion, combined with a stark realism. There's a faint Eastern cast to the rendering, and the boxes behind the subject's head suggest illegal powders: could be the boss of an opium den in old Shanghai. In fact it's the blameless co-owner of the venue, Richard Hűbner.
Portrait - Woman. A woman's face is composed to the left. It is a magnificent face, sensual and alert, with a powerful beauty; her green eyes stare outwards in an expression of concerned optimism tempered by life and its accumulated experience. The right of the canvas is occupied by a dimly-glimpsed empty room, with an echo of the desolation of Edward Hopper's bleak masterpiece Night Hawks (1942, Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois). The woman's face is illuminated with strong front light, almost as if under interrogation. The image has a super-real quality; frank, intriguing, revelatory.
Portrait - Prostrate Nude Man (canvas in portrait format). A man's presented naked, feet nearest to us, head pointing away, elbows drawn up. There's no background: the body is floating in white space. There's a luscious rendering to the flesh, tempered by subtle and strong shading. The result's a magnificent ambiguity: the body could be lying, flying, or dead, or laid out for carving on a butcher's slab.
Studies Six works are hung in a 2 x 3 matrix. Each is a treatment, in black and white, of light at the edge of curtains, windows and skylights.
Holly Lucas studies painting at the London Institute's Chelsea College of Art and Design. This exhibition reveals her remarkable power as an artist to get under the skin of her subjects, and paint them from the inside. Whether her perceptions of their thoughts and feelings are accurate, only the subjects will know, but they are there, as clearly as her fine delineation of fold and line.
Each painting has integrity in both senses: of completeness, and complete honesty. There's a sense of visual balance to each work. It's a balance that's of its time. Just as Renaissance composition reflected the discovery of the Golden Section, Holly Lucas's geometry, (even to the proportions of the canvasses) gives a passing nod to that most iconic contemporary art, the cinema screen.
It's an exciting exhibition by a remarkably gifted artist.
Credits (alpha order): Artist - Holly Lucas
END
John Park
reviewed 9 September 03 / Indo
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012
