Geraldine Swayne: Silvering

An exhibition of paintings by the artist Geraldine Swayne. Drawing together recent works on canvas, aluminium and copper, these works are suggestive and mysterious. People on the verge of action populate Geraldine’s paintings, like film stills. The atmosphere is thick with tension and heightened emotion yet the narrative is obscured, like entering a room where a television has been left paused. The scenes are often awkward, haunting, sexy, bizarre, dark, or amusing – maybe all at once. Her oblique narrative references allow the viewer to project their own story on to the works.

In all the works in this exhibition there is an attention to the surface quality and material value of the work. The artist has cited Nicholas Hilliard as an influence in seeking to make paintings that are also inherently beautiful objects. Some of the larger works use silver and gold grounds that anticipate the artist’s use of aluminium and copper surfaces. Swayne deftly manipulates this unforgiving medium so that, in her own words, ‘they almost look good enough to eat’.