Beep Painting Biennial 2022 - Winners exhibition

Rachel Lancaster is presenting a solo exhibition as part of the Beep Painting Biennial 2022 - Winners exhibition

For Rachel Lancaster, painting slows down the act of looking; it invites the gaze to linger upon the otherwise overlooked. With a focus on the intersections of painting with cinema, photography and music, Lancaster edits and translates photographic ‘stills’ into oil paintings, drawing on found moving imagery, her own photographs, and drawings rendered directly from her imagination.

Although her style is contemporary, Lancaster is indebted to the painterly tradition of still life, and in particular vanitas works – symbolic still life’s that communicate earthly transience and the inevitability of death. She depicts detailed fragments divorced from greater narratives, rendering those fragments both descriptive and abstract, ambiguous and open-ended – the close-up texture of fabric, for example, or an unlabelled parcel, uncannily illuminated, playfully enigmatic. She reveals the uncanny beauty and quiet spectacle that lies beyond the action.

The paintings are made by applying successive thin glazes of translucent oil paint, allowing many layers of colour and texture to accrue over time. Slipping between definition and abstraction, her surfaces contain an array of optical effects. Often, anticipated details give way to looser, minimal rendering that is revealed as a painterly abstraction upon closer inspection. The artist carefully considers subtle decisions about cropping the source material, and through an open ended, intuitive process, evokes a narrative that is full of mystery and intrigue. Careful attention to multiple scales – life size, close up, zoom, at a distance – establish distinct modes of viewing, placing the viewer in different vantage points, on the floor, at eye level, looking down upon the subject. The eerie scenes are as if they are within their own temporality, either stuck in the past or in a limbo state. Reflections, colours and action point beyond the canvas, suggestive of what else is happening outside the image, lurking out of sight.  Lancasters work references the dreamlike sense of otherness found, in particular, in cinema, reimagining this upon the canvas.