NAOMI FREARS

29TH MAY UNTIL 23RD JUNE

‘It’s more about possibilities, not solutions’

Rirkrit Tiravanija. Artist

INTRODUCTION

Naomi Frears is a painter. Her need to paint is an obsession. Ideas collected away from home are brought home to the studio to be captured and translated onto canvas. Memories (people and places) are allowed to linger, to be transformed by a mix of emotions, physical action and intuition

'The need is to make something I have never seen before but that I recognise... something I have glimpsed; a beautiful and unstable memory suspended on my retina.’ [1]

The result is testament to a fight which has been hidden from our view. What remains is the rubbed and stained surface. The paintings appear serene and calm, poetic and beautiful. The space in which they are made - Porthmeor Studios - looks out onto a beach and expanse of sea, letting in the air and light so associated with the modernist St Ives painters and makers. A sense of place is never more deeply felt than here.

Within this particular context, however, Frears strives to find the break or liminal space between the visible and invisible; edges and boundaries become the borderlines of intimate distance. The figure is never perceived as flesh and blood but as a stain, floating but held by the physical frame of the canvas edge.
Our fear - and desire - is to have someone close - to break through the space we construct around us. We long to really know another, to find a connection. A person’s presence is made visible to us by their physicality, their skin, their face - but we can never really ‘know’ the inside, the soul, the invisible. We look for the one person that can mirror ourselves back to us. Is the body, as depicted by Frears, my twin, my object of desire? This body (sometimes male, sometimes female) is more sensual in feel than erotic. Or is it the body of the painter present in the work?

‘You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens... even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.’ [2]

Her figures usually stand alone, connected only through occasional fragments of the real world - a detail of a landscape, curtains parted, an area of intense colour or decoration. Spatial and psychic boundaries are still fluid; the figure is not separate from the surface, but part of it. Theorist Julia Kristeva suggests that it is through art that we can recover the semiotic (semiotic being before language) ‘traces of a marginal experience, through and across which a maternal body might recognise its own, otherwise inexpressible in our culture.’ [3]

Frears gives a sense of this closeness and separation on the same canvas or page, led by intuition and a sense of freedom. One of her recent paintings depicts curtains with their creases and folds drawn up and open, inviting the viewer in. They are reminiscent of a number of works by Piero della Francesca, based around The Nativity, where both curtains and clothes show similar folds in intimate detail.

In many of her works there appears to be an invitation or a gift. A shadowy figure stares out of sightless eyes tentatively holding out a hand, a gesture that beckons us in. A tree, a rose, an island in a lake - call us, to take part, to take hold, to possess these objects, this place, this person.

Ideas around desire and loss; intimacy and distance; the body and the stain are dichotomies that are vital to Frears’ work, both in feeding the constant search for meaning that is evident, alongside an incredible confidence and joy in being a painter. Although she does not articulate her work as a series, there is a dialogue between them all - and ultimately, with us.


Gill Nicol . Head of Interaction, Arnolfini, Bristol . April 2010.


[1] Artist in conversation with author, April 2009
[2] Barthes, R. (1977) Roland Barthes, p 31
[3] Kristeva, J (1980) ‘Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini’ in Desire in Language: p 243