Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples
Grace Wright
Grand Illusions
Gow Langsford, Onehunga
Until July 19
Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples
“In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of Chaos:”
John Milton “Paradise Lost”
John Miltons lines at the beginning of Paradise Lost provide a succinct description of Grace Wrights suite of paintings in her show Grand Illusions. Equally the description of Charles Albury’s who was an observer of the effects of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima are also applicable – “We watched that cloud rise. It had every colour of the world up there, beautiful colours. To me it looked like salmon colours, blues, greens.”
Theses impressions of shape, design and colour are something we also see in the images of the heavens taken by NASA revealing what appears to be chaos in the Milky Way and other galaxies.
Wright’s paintings conjure up a range of associations, from the of cosmic to the microscopic with some of her images linked to brain scans and the flares of neurological synapses as in her “The Causes of Seeds Plants and Fruit”.
As with her previous work the artist explores the confluence between abstraction, symbolism and realism with a colour palette echoing the renaissance masters as well as the great Impressionist.
With a lot of her work she appears to have a contemporary take on the Baroque with images such as “On the Disposition which Characterise the Wise)” with its drama and exuberance. Here the brush strokes suggesting the writhing bodies of baroque paintings in the paintings of Giovanni Battista Gaulli, at the Il Gesu church in Rome.
With “Cosmology” there is a sense of floating diaphanous fabrics in pastel colours while works like “The Causes of Atmospheric Phenomena provide a sense of dramatic skies after a storm .
The small lively brushstrokes in several of the works suggest small birds in flight (On the Beauty of Song” or carefully described shell forms (Projections). These lively brushstrokes also make the viewer aware of following the mark making of the artist, both the small tentative marks as well as the grand gestures.
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