PAINTING REPRODUCTION CHARLOTTE SNOOK
Charlotte Snook’s practice is deeply invested in allegory, art history and re-imagination. Velazquez’s ‘Las Meninas’, Rodin’s intricate Gates of Hell, Giambattista Tiepolo’s drawings, Goya’s ‘Black Paintings’, the story of Judith and Holofernes, and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, sources full of elegance and violence, set the foundations for Snook’s creation of her own powerful, enchanted world. The paintings are populated with vaguely familiar yet unknown quantities, smeared and spontaneously reworked into oblivion. The minimalism of the drawings commune with piles of sinners and the sinned against. The damned figures lead us back to tension in the paintings. Snook’s themes follow each other from drawing to canvas and sculpture and back again, mutating and exposing fresh human vulnerabilities with each reinvention we encounter.Her themes follow each other from drawing to canvas and sculpture and back again, mutating and exposing fresh human vulnerabilities with each reinvention we encounter. The work takes us to the edge and asks us to question what we see. As a viewer, one looks for a safe place to rest–places to identify and name. Snook gives us a platform to jump from… but the excitement of these works is that there is no place to truly land or settle.
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