Silent Painting

About

Curated by Alexandra Baraitser www.alexandrab.org.uk 

A painting is finished only if it is painted with extraordinary sensitivity, with brushwork that enhances intimacy and intensity. Only then can the viewer truly contemplate it. And standing there in front of it in a quiet gallery, we are both looking and listening. The exhibition Silent Painting brings together three artists who use paint and mark making techniques to recreate two dimensional noiseless energy.

The artists showing at Tripp Gallery http://trippgallery.co.uk/  apply techniques to imbue an image with a symbolic dimension that speaks to the moment of having nothing left to say, when words and sounds fall silent. They also utilise visual, tactile and olfactory senses to tell their story.

Pryymak, for example, executes dramatically lit canvases depicting female figures in quiet contemplation. The smell and tactility of the herb-filled jars exhibited alongside them activate a sense of the uncanny.

Through painting Baraitser makes her own interpretation of iconic architecture and its associated lifestyle. The fashionable scenes displayed in her work are populated but focus on the non-communication or separation of each figure from the other.

Fountain's work reflects the artist's emotional landscapes and painting them is partly therapy for processing what she describes as her daily anxiety and unease. Paint and paper are useful tools for expressing the intensity of feeling within her relationship with her daughter and when reflecting on her own past childhood.

The paintings in the show Silent Painting raise the question of whether painting has a voice. Maybe it does, but what is certain is that painting has the ability to touch on subjects that bring us to a psychological and material space where we can experience silence.