ART-PREVIEW:Gabriella Boyd-Help Yourself

Gabriella Boyd mainly works with oil paints on canvas and often creates imagined locations using only colour and line as her guidance. Working from photographs, drawings and recalled memories and observations, Gabriella depicts “Fleeting interactions or moments of failed intimacy”. Building up these imagined locations in painted layers she pushes the boundaries of perceived space with no clear direction of where they will ultimately end.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Blain|Southern Gallery Archive

Gabriella Boyd’s solo exhibition “Help Yourself” at Blain|Southern Gallery in London is the fourth in the Lodger series. The artist has created a new series of paintings, in which dream logic appears to dominate, and the atmosphere is suffused with both eroticism and threat. Caught between fretful urgency and an odd, immobilising calm, these canvases feel like glimpses into a sideways dimension, where everything from social conventions to the laws of physics have been subtly redrafted by some shadowy consciousness. Rendered in a palette of warm yellows, pinks, oranges and deep reds, we might imagine these works giving off heat, like sunbaked brickwork, or human skin. Time accretes on their surfaces, marked by single, swift brushstrokes and dense fogs of pigment. Space buckles and collapses in on itself, and bodies are turned inside out. Human relationships take on shapes that are at once strange and strangely familiar, while near-diagrammatic modes of depiction coexist with the airy diffusion of colour, line and form. “I’m fascinated by how you remember a vivid dream. As time passes you might only recall a single frame or an emotion. This is a very liberating, useful method in terms of creativity: to understand that you can simply enjoy holding onto one fragment from a film or story and it doesn’t have to be tied to that particular source” Perhaps it’s not dream logic that holds sway here at all, but rather simply Boyd’s medium. Like dreams, paintings have their own protocols, and their own deep sense of what’s necessary. They strive towards what the artist has termed a ‘given-ness’, the compositional and emotional establishment of a believable world.

Info: Blain|Southern, 4 Hanover Square, London, Duration 23/3-5/5/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 10:00-17:00, www.blainsouthern.com