Paintings

Clearly Siopis revels in the visual possibilities of her media exploiting them with virtuoso aplomb. Evoking the elemental in her richly textured fields of red, blue and green she swamps the surfaces of her works with allusions to fire, blood, water and nature. However the tone of Siopis’ palette is out of register with the natural world. In her vision water is lime and viridian, blood is a screaming cerise orange, the colour of flesh mottled greys and high-end pink. This operatic pitch of colour is reinforced by the large scale of much of the work and a continuing interest that Siopis has in exploring extreme emotional states. Her images of violence (in one instance torture), eroticism and death are sourced from the media, films, books, pornography and her own experience.

Siopis’ other constant referent within this exhibition is art itself. Utilising a broad variety of references from both the visual and literary arts she plays diverse vocabularies against one another. Modernism (particularly gestural abstract expressionism) creates the ground/matrix upon which her figurative references are situated. Her figuration, in itself, is often created in a range of illustrative modes that stretches from those that accompany children’s stories to images from Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. This juxtaposition of visual languages allows Siopis to allude to both grand and minor narratives in the same work. It also stops her abstraction from falling prey to being merely effect for its own sake and lets the painting hover in a liminal space between abstraction and figuration.

It is in fact this threshold where painting wavers between manifesting as image and where form cannot hold, that Siopis seems most interested. Theoretically informed by Georges Bataille’s idea of informe or the ‘formless’, that posits a conceptual space beyond the modernist binaries of form and content, Siopis is ‘interested in materiality as idea and sensation, as something more than merely a means to make an image’. In attempting to manifest this Siopis is, at times, successful and at others awkward.

‘Paintings’ is, in effect, a dangerous show for the artist and a difficult one for the viewer. In its provocations to moral and stylistic taste, and in its dialogue between visual modes where it sets up a balancing act that, by its very nature, is unsteady, it creates the tensions that are nonetheless part of the exhibition’s interest.

Sometimes it is the smaller works that succeed. For instance Twins (2009), despite its modest size, convincingly realises an intense presence. Depicting a pair of Siamese twins joined chest to chest, its rendition of the body clearly moves beyond the merely descriptive. The swirling coalescence of glue and ink conjoins the twins in a way that not only evokes the flesh, bone and connective tissue, but also posits a palpable sense of non-material relationship.

Elsewhere, despite or perhaps because of Siopis’ bravura handling of her material, parts of the works paradoxically appear either facile or clumsy. Some of the images on exhibition, for example, suffer from elements that are overly described. Ironically it is often in these graphic constituents where Siopis, using more traditional skills, loses some of the conviction of her mark. Compare, for instance, the treatment of the head of the Ophelia figure in Still Waters (2009) with that of the heads in Twins. Situated in a green and white world of water lilies and jellyfish the face in Still Waters is detailed in an illustrative manner that depicts finely plucked eyebrows and a carefully delineated mouth with teeth. This specificity is in itself not a problem, but the result is a mask of solidity that uncomfortably separates out from, rather than immerses itself in its sea of translucency.
 
The features of the twins’ faces, on the other hand, are appropriately elusive. The mouths sit lightly on the skin like smudges of makeup. The ink drawing of the eyes, scrawled directly on the canvas, seems to hesitate under the semi-transparent aperture of the eyelid skin that eludes fixity of position in its deliberately tentative rendering. The slippage of form between inner and outer worlds is particularly effective.

The control of the more graphic elements in Three Trees (2009) renders another example where the handling of aspects of the painting is not entirely convincing. The image, co-opted from a Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock print, depicts a violent double rape; yet contrary to the clean lines of the original print the centre of the canvas explodes in painterly action. The locus/event of penetration is obliterated in a frenzied chaos of red, and the disruption of form is brutal and powerfully evocative.

Shifting pictorial register on the periphery of the painting, however Siopis employs a more literal depiction of the ropes that secure the unfortunate woman to the trees, forcing the splaying of her legs. Conceptually this tying down of the image at its frame has much potential, but Siopis’ handling of the form of the rope is curiously clumsy, lacking the clear conviction of its original illustrative source and yet not quite moving into a credible alternative – a failing that ultimately distracts one from the virtuosity of the central action where the viewer is seduced into a disturbing complicity of voyeuristic scrutiny.

Better able to maintain its overall tension between elements is Migrants (2008). This work hides its subject so well that one initially detects simply marks discharged across the canvas surface. Exceptionally pleasing in its control of tonality, vivacity of mark and limited colour range Migrants is beguiling in its aesthetic satisfaction and might easily be mistaken for a highly accomplished, purely decorative work. Yet while the piece posits pleasure as a first potential reading Migrants, like its title, hides darker layers of meaning in its swirling forms and darting marks. On closer inspection the piece reveals a frenzy of birds swooping and catching insects (identified as flying ants in the catalogue). This is the end of the world for some and its apocalyptic undertones rear up in the trailing vortexes that spiral like smoking, gunned down planes across its surface. Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) seems a possible precedent and the work also has an affinity with the complex compositions of Bruegel the Elder such as the Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562) or the Last Judgement paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.

Migrants is possibly the fulcrum on which this exhibition turns – an apparently banal image both in its inception and appearance, but one that posits a moment of reckoning, a transition between one thing and another, the slippage between life and death, barely visible at first glance, where form is arrested in its moment of dissolution into formlessness.