‘Melt’ is a show of recent works by Enya Lachman-Curl.
In this exhibition of oil paintings, the artist has taken influence from natural landscapes and organic forms, distilling these reference points into a more broken down, fluid vocabulary of painterly marks. By subtly dissolving the link with their figurative sources, she is able to play with these visual elements, using them to build up a compositional language that is shared across the works on show.
In these compositions boundaries become blurred, with different pictorial qualities layered and contrasted to outline their metamorphic effects; surfaces appear deep with rich colour in places, then are thinly scraped back in others; sculptural brush marks are laid densely over one another until they appear to merge, then elsewhere they are silhouetted against stark, flat planes of colour, highlighting their individual sweeping yet delicate structures. Scale plays a part too: large format panels are punctuated throughout by small-scale fragmentary studies, demanding the viewer to first step back and then peer in closely to read the relationship between different pieces.
As ever, the materiality of paint itself is central to the artist’s work – each panel intimately tracing her engagement with how paint behaves, how it can be shaped and shifted to create volume and form. The viewer’s eye is able to follow the narrative of how each painting is intuitively built up, mark upon mark, layer upon layer, filling the void with simple building blocks that lead to creative complexity.
Enya is a London-based artist who has previously held studios and exhibited in Bristol, England; San Francisco, USA; and Glasgow, Scotland.
Text by George Bray
Preview 9th March | Open by Appointment | Until the 3rd April
- Hours Space Bristol 10 Colston Yard -