Rebecca Ness has lengthy been certainly one of our favourite figurative painters of the final 10 years, and we’ve had her featured within the journal a couple of instances lately. Within the Summer time 2024 Quarterly, she advised Charles Moore, “I believe my portray language now could be primarily based on life, however I additionally do not need to lie. I am not pretending that it is something apart from a portray with paint and brushes. However on the similar time, we will create issues which are greater or extra luscious than life, or we will mimic a dream or a thought.” This looks as if a great place to start out with Ness’ new present, Reminiscences of Daydreams, on now at Morgan Presents, which you’ll be able to learn the press launch beneath…
These work by Rebecca Ness are footage of quotidian life. Collectively they current a portrait of our societal second and doc our time: an age that Ness understands as constituted by a menagerie of moments, a set that unwaveringly acknowledges the wealthy complexity of every particular person’s inside life.
The compositions lure us in by sustaining an approachable façade, a seemingly graspable narrative constituted by a dynamic and plush formal nature. Inside this formal consideration we will find the essence of that artist’s follow: Ness’ works are about each the act of portray and the materiality of paint. The artist’s playful and concurrently intense utilization of sunshine, perspective and the unwavering accentuation of oil paint’s physicality, continues a historic inquiry into the constraints of the medium initiated by the artist’s central precursors: Philip Guston, Norman Rockwell, and Lucian Freud.
The on a regular basis nature of the ostensible pictorial content material masks the effervescent tensions beneath the floor. This assortment of moments seems to showcase a world of normalcy that was promised unto us past the trials of a pandemic and different world challenges; as an alternative of a singular utopian imaginative and prescient, nonetheless, this societal image composed of people, highlights every determine’s want to belong. The topics of Ness’ work, whether or not enveloped in littered detritus, or remoted amongst the lapping waves, yearn to be seen.
This scrapbook of vignettes is notably devoid of a single authorial perspective, as an alternative presenting what could also be fragments of a story, or even perhaps moments of distraction from a bigger obscured thesis. Human moments are depicted from an abstracted place of voyeurism. The work’ topics are conscious of this voyeuristic viewer’s eye, but concurrently considerably apathetic to its surveillance. In her elevation of people’ interiority and the rejection of some overarching, unchallengeable vantage, Ness asserts that not solely is all historical past human, however it’s our historical past, that we write with a pen in our arms by way of our on a regular basis actions.
Ness identifies a radicality in her resolution to doc the on a regular basis in a grander formal language extra akin to historical past portray than documentary photorealism. But this selection of seemingly peculiar material serves to show our consideration to the work of the brushstroke, the gesture and the load of the paint itself.