EMMA BENNETT; colour power house by David Chandler
Emma Bennett’s constructivist panels amount to much more than painted renders of invented architecture. Her new work revisits Modernism as experimental territory for the subjects of painting with a programme that reconfigures developer deco down town places; a department store, shopping centre or multi storey car park staircase.
Her process revives the methods of early twentieth century pioneers of urban space using an oblique axonometric, or an architect’s graphic elevation wrapped in geometric flags. She offers us a Brutalist poetic in a limited palette of colour blocks. These generate optical reverberations and unexpected inner light sources. So her exhibitions become an electric dialogue of planes and voids animating gallery walls; pure colour fields, monumental diagonals, insistent stripes, checked grids. Carefully charted with paint samples retained by the artist for future overpainting and revisions.
Her new work also demonstrates a generous sense of scale. Her ambition is an urbs picta, a painted city, from a civic façade or installation space to painted windows or portholes offering glimpses of “a happy new town riding on the back of the old”. The legacy of twentieth century architecture is re-cladding itself, for many urgent reasons, in an overcast metropolitan palette, here re-worked by the painter to invite us to a festival of schematic townscape.
Recent British painting celebrated the desolations of subtopia and decay with forensic scrutiny. Emma Bennett’s urban subject matter has quarried those traditions, instead dressing them in the livery of play, dancing to new music.
Text commissioned by Navigator North and featured in the DOWN TOWN exhibition
Her process revives the methods of early twentieth century pioneers of urban space using an oblique axonometric, or an architect’s graphic elevation wrapped in geometric flags. She offers us a Brutalist poetic in a limited palette of colour blocks. These generate optical reverberations and unexpected inner light sources. So her exhibitions become an electric dialogue of planes and voids animating gallery walls; pure colour fields, monumental diagonals, insistent stripes, checked grids. Carefully charted with paint samples retained by the artist for future overpainting and revisions.
Her new work also demonstrates a generous sense of scale. Her ambition is an urbs picta, a painted city, from a civic façade or installation space to painted windows or portholes offering glimpses of “a happy new town riding on the back of the old”. The legacy of twentieth century architecture is re-cladding itself, for many urgent reasons, in an overcast metropolitan palette, here re-worked by the painter to invite us to a festival of schematic townscape.
Recent British painting celebrated the desolations of subtopia and decay with forensic scrutiny. Emma Bennett’s urban subject matter has quarried those traditions, instead dressing them in the livery of play, dancing to new music.
Text commissioned by Navigator North and featured in the DOWN TOWN exhibition