Herald St

Lesley Vance

Herald St | 2 Herald St, E2 6JT

9th October - 19th November 2022

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While no two paintings ever begin the same way, Vance always starts with a concrete subject which remains unknown to the viewer. Studying the marbled and meandering pools of colour remaining at this stage, the artist guides the painting into being, steadily adding definition to her initial burst of gesture and working at a pace to crystallise the composition while the oil is wet enough to manipulate. Upending the traditional speeds inherent to each medium, Vance is able to linger over her watercolours, using a less absorbent ground which allows the liquid to sit atop it for longer. Time endures in her paintings, as if she has paused them; as the artist states, ‘They had a life before, and they’ll have a life after.’

When conceiving the present body of work, Vance kept returning to the idea of circulation: ‘I don’t let you out of the painting, everything comes back into the painting’. She compares her compositions to the Mobius strip or Klein bottle, topological phenomena with no distinct boundaries, beginnings, or ends. The artist works in opposites, building volume into a two-dimensional surface and confounding layers of painterly swirls and flat planes with shadows. Her paintings emanate from her process; action and movement are entangled in the final, still image. The artist enfolds these playful tensions into her work, resulting in windows of quiet visual drama.