31 x 46 in
Joanna van Son is a London based painter born in Oman to Venezuelan/Irish and Dutch parents, and raised in China, Russia, and the UK. Van Son commenced her current artistic practice while studying architecture at the Bartlett. Her texturally impasto portraits expose the architectural components of framework making that relate figural subjects to a space informed by their own existence. Van Son explores the building, breaking and re-building of contexts and conditions of longing as her depictions of her workspace straddle between imagination and observation. Attracted to the intensity of bodily representations in Baroque art, van Son takes particular interest in paintings by the master Caravaggio and the dynamism he brought forth through candlelight. Recognising the dynamic quality of figurations in Caravaggio’s as well as the contemporary artist Cecily Brown’s paintings, van Son developed a vital appreciation for process and the work place, from which it is created, in her work. Ultimately, her fascination is with the playfully-violent grey zones of reality-making that are made visible by the practices of art and architecture. Van Son draws upon her engagement with both disciplines to paint the ‘forces’ that lie beneath meaning and affect and give them their structure, revealing the often-occluded processes that constitute the phenomenological bridge between experience and recollection
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