CHARLIE SMITH LONDON is delighted to announce Emma
Bennett’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery.
Bennett is well known for her sumptuous paintings that set
figurative elements against black, monochromatic grounds. Potentially
incongruous elements might be included in any singular piece including flowers;
fruit; fire; water; fabric; or game; and more recently interior objects and
details including lamps, table tops, curtains, stairs, alcoves and mirrors. Any
indication of dissonance, however, is assuaged by fundamental, underlying interpretation
and superlative compositional awareness. Bennett’s use of memento mori is well
documented, as she intelligently navigates traditional motifs in combination
with alternative, contemporary imagery derived from film and photography.
The ephemeral and intangible are relentlessly depicted, and
now in combination with notions of place, as well as time. There is a
foreground and background; and movement through, from or within a tangible space
is suggested by stairs or mirrors that lead the eye around the picture plane. Presence,
or rather absence, is effortlessly evidenced. These more spatial paintings
suggest film settings and Bennett’s love of cinema is palpable within this
collection. Referencing Laura Mulvey’s discourse on film in ‘Death 24x a
Second’, where she suggests film ‘combines, perhaps more perfectly than any
other medium, two human fascinations: one with the boundary between life and
death and the other with the mechanical animation of the inanimate’[1], we come to
appreciate how creators throughout history have continued to meditate on the
fundamentals of existence.
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