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Ena Swansea
green light
14 May – 30 July 2021
Ena Swansea (b. 1966) is celebrated for her intricately layered ‘slow paintings’ which border on abstraction and demonstrate the artist’s ingenuity with the painted surface. Swansea’s newest series is representative of her decontextualised and timeless style, directing attention back to painting itself. green light implies a chance to at last put one’s foot on the gas, after being stopped and daydreaming outside of clock time, not knowing what day it is.
Swansea studied film before turning to painting and she brings a cinematic quality to her work: it is evident in her composition, choice of subject matter, handling of paint and experimental use of materials. She also uses photography to capture evocative moments that inform her work - she has an ever-growing archive of over 160,000 images that are organised conceptually. Below are a few of her photographs that relate to her paintings.
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Images from Swansea’s photographic archive
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The paintings are often large which gives them a human scale and presence when seen in the flesh. The use of both line and colour is expressive - sometimes the scenes have a feeling of motion blur or narrow depth of field with certain areas freely rendered and others in crisp detail. The subject matter is often a recognisable space, but somehow changed so it is unfamiliar.
The subject matter is often rooted in the every day, but there is perhaps a tie here to Cinéma Vérité where the ordinary becomes extraordinary under scrutiny. However, some of Swansea's works are less tied to reality and use luminescent colours and we are viewing a scene that is on the edge of disintegration.
The subject matter of these works has personal meaning for Swansea, but she is completely open to the interpretation of her works from the viewer and is aware that her conscious understanding of it is surely only the tip of the iceberg. In the video below she discusses the exhibition, the narratives behind some of the works and the ideas that she was considering while painting these works and putting this show together.
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road, 2019 in progress in Swansea's New York studio.
Here, Swansea depicts a tree-lined road winding away from the viewer; the dappled light and open road evoke a feeling of spring and potential. In the foreground a road sign reading 'CATION' edges into the scene - a deliberate misspelling of 'caution' that is a nod to wordplay and corrupted spellings that accumulate meaning, warning the viewer away from seeing this as idealistic escapism.
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For years Swansea has worked closely with expert paint makers to create unusual pigments and experiment with adding graphite to her pigments in a stable way that lend a quality to her surface that is quite unique. They change in different lights. Graphite can have the effect of reflecting and absorbing light and is a hallmark of Swansea's style.
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paintings on display in the show
Ena Swansea: Behind the scene
Past viewing_room
