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Ena Swanseas paintings is found as much in her technique as in her depicted images. Working in oil paint over graphite grounds, Swansea allows the unpredictable qualities of her media to clash with alchemic tension. Her highly worked surfaces are physical embodiments of sophisticated psychologies: her depicted environments hover between reality and fantasy dimensions, reflecting the inner spirituality and volatile self-awareness of her female characters.Combining drawing with painting, Ena Swanseas canvases invoke a timeless sentimentality. Working from memory rather than photographs, Swansea conjures her images from a subliminal void. Instead of solidifying form, her colours replicate light itself: shimmering highlights and sooty shadows emanate from objects not physically rendered, but transiently implied through positive and negative space.This formal allusion is replicated in the materiality of her surfaces: the uniquely gritty and greasy texture of graphic radiates with a metallic and dusty sheen, both deflecting and consuming light. Masked by breezy layers of oil paint, figures emerge as ghost-like contours, suspended in dream-space. Ena Swanseas work captures a broken sense of time and space, where frail figures inhabit a world that is deceptively emotive and unstable.
Ena Swansea exploits the malleability of paint to embrace a sense of theatrical drama. Formulaic elements of film are constructed with painterly sensitivity: elongated viewpoints, provocative lighting and the choreographed positions of her figures are used to create suggestions of narrative fiction and emotional hesitancy. Her pastoral scenes are infused with a surreal disorientation.Ena Swansea constructs her idyll daydreams as sources of empowerment and innuendo. Alluding to the sexual nature of the subconscious, Swanseas heroines are both victims and manipulators, their environments made larger in their hyperawareness of their own mystical powers and neurotic susceptibilities. Within her enigmatic paintings, Swansea defines feminine identity as an omnipotent force, entwining the carnal and cerebral in a confident, metaphysical self-knowledge.Ena Swansea builds her paintings up in canorous layers, combining the illusive quality of oil paint with the deadened effect of graphite. In Theory of Relativity, Swanseas process creates an ethereal architecture. Over her dark, smothering base, each brushstroke of white paint is frozen, capturing the energy of its making. Swansea concocts a tenuous anxiety: her gestures vibrate with an unnatural light, infusing this innocuous scene of commuter travel with surreal disorientation. Dwarfed in the engulfing train carriage, Swanseas figure is both victim and manipulator, her environment aggrandised in the hyperawareness of her own fragility.
About the Author
View Ena Swansea paintings, biography, solo exhibitions, group exhibitions and resource of Ena Swansea artist. View art online at The Saatchi Gallery - London contemporary art gallery.Ena Swansea
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