Yvonne Abercrombie at Sanc Gallery

By Danae Ripley

6th August 2020

There is a swooning effect to the enriched figures and fragments in Yvonne Abercrombie’s recent painting. Romantic mauves, electric pinks and forest green’s jive with the scantily clad heroes and heroines. Magical and heartbreaking encounters between animals and man strike fantastical chords. Figures flirt with multiple planes of heaving contrast and playful brushwork. They are in one way, metaphysical mannequins - dancing with aloof familiarity. Abercrombie washes, stipples and carves us a panoptical view.  

Only in paint could these cropped meadows be called upon. There is a remarkable fluency in fictive space - conjured up by thinly painted grounds and dappled forms. A lively surface populated with thuds and hisses. Pigmented echoes and assimilated marks lurch and settle to fill each fish tank. The calculated distortions find comradery with Post-Impressionism and the works of 15th-century Greek master El Greco. The unique spatial conditions of El Greco dematerialise similarly, light is incandescent and space becomes void. An internal rhythm of surface setting up a schematic treatment of figure and mark with interchangeable hierarchy. 

A host of oblique references--Mills and Boon covers, The Jungle Book and the female nude set up popular and personal playgrounds where themes, emotions and motives stretch out to the viewer. The imagery for each painting reconciles attention to character and setting. Straight backs and pointed feet daintily traipse over abstract forms. Positions iconically attributed to beauty simultaneously reference anxiety about the female body. An old horse beaten - but in the works of this artist finds ripe new terrain. The painter sublimates any fear or insecurity into deliberate smears and colourful negotiations with fluency. Tender bodily colours saddle turbulent forms. The bodies are seen and bear currents and forces, coaxed, swathed and speckled by pure colour. A series of painted enquiries in which a wrestle with fear keeps the work alive.

Helen Johnson claims that virtual media furnishes a space for anyone to develop psychic potentialities, “To fashion for themselves a space between dream and reality. With painting, however, you are left with an object, a residue produced between one’s subjecthood and one’s idea of the world, which in the end are one and the same thing.” It is then to be said that the external world is seduced by the artist’s internal theatre.

Notably, these works retain a buzz of discoveries across the entire show. Where perhaps an autobiographical spark lit up one fiery world, the prompt for another may be delineating the fleshy contour of the knee pressed to the thigh or the subtle change in tones on a deltoid. As the titles of Abercrombie’s work suggest, each painting has settled a score. The painted mark distils and instils confidence - there is control in attraction.