Gabriella Boyd: Help Yourself

For the fourth exhibition in Blain|Southern’s Lodger series, the artist Gabriella Boyd has created a new series of paintings, in which dream logic appears to dominate, and the atmosphere is suffused with both eroticism and threat.

Caught between fretful urgency and an odd, immobilising calm, these canvases feel like glimpses into a sideways dimension, where everything from social conventions to the laws of physics has been subtly redrafted by some shadowy consciousness.

Rendered in a palette of warm yellows, pinks, oranges and deep reds, we might imagine these works giving off heat, like sunbaked brickwork, or human skin. Time accretes on their surfaces, marked by single, swift brushstrokes and dense fogs of pigment. Space buckles and collapses in on itself and bodies are turned inside out. Human relationships take on shapes that are at once strange and strangely familiar, while near-diagrammatic modes of depiction coexist with the airy diffusion of colour, line and form.

Perhaps it’s not dream logic that holds sway here at all, but rather simply Boyd’s medium. Like dreams, paintings have their own protocols and their own deep sense of what’s necessary. They strive towards what the artist has termed a ‘given-ness’, the compositional and emotional establishment of ‘a believable world’.