DIANA RATTRAY – NEITHER HERE NOR NOW
2014-10-27Rattray’s style is quite her own, inspired by black-and-white photographs from English and German photo albums of the second half of the twentieth century. The artist’s own reading of this historical pictorial matrix is highly realistic and she interprets it in the same vein, albeit with the requisite pinch of irony, as when she lends the positivism of the 1950s a twist in the particular outcome that may be comic, awry or eccentric and quirky.
The types of figure that people the world of Diana Rattray’s pastel paintings will be familiar to everyone – folks at family celebrations, children in their Sunday best, families on day-trips – events recorded in order to have remembrance of this special day or that one moment on tap at any time. Some of the people seem to be adopting poses. They suspend what they are doing, face the viewer and lay on a smile in the knowledge that it will be recorded. The smile conditioned for the purpose is a preoccupation in this artist’s work. It is a smile that only takes place on the surface and reveals nothing about a person’s inner being.
At first glance it seems as if these paintings preserve a time in which everything was that little bit more ordered, a little simpler. But the viewer also becomes conscious of the choreographed nature of the scene. By heightening her colouring and amplifying a situation depicted, the artist points us toward a wider scope of meaning. The subtle elaboration of areas of shadow hints at the emotional world beyond the visible surface. A melancholy trait comes to the smiling lips, and something rigid to the faces; and, finding themselves face-to-face with the figures in the pictures, viewers are thrown back upon themselves. As a chronicler and at the same time an alert contemporary, Diana Rattray makes use of the distance in time and space to reconnect emotional memory. One’s own memory is triggered by the recognition of certain situations, and the figures in the pastel paintings become the projection surfaces for moments and feelingsout of personal experience. Simultaneously, the everyday nature of the situations Diana Rattray chooses for her paintings lends them a universality.
Exhibition runs through to December 20th, 2014
Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer
Heinrich-Heine-Allee 19 & Neustrasse 12
40213 Düsseldorf
Germany
