Untitled Art, Miami, 2021: Tomo Campbell | Tahnee Lonsdale

Inspired by a diverse array of source material, Tomo Campbell’s large-scale oil paintings are constantly altering, extending and breaking down conventions. His abstracted depictions of ‘traditional’ subjects such as hunting, parades and explorers are, as he puts it, ‘never quite solid or whole’, yet they exude an extraordinarily rich sense of vision. ‘I try to paint in a way that makes the paint vibrate’, says Campbell, ‘to make it look light and delicate and on the cusp of shifting’. His bold, layered arrangements of complementary colours, reminiscent of the Rococo, offer multiple focal points and keep the eye in constant motion. Balancing activity and stasis, confidence and doubt, his works occupy a fertile space somewhere between the known and the undiscovered.

 

Working between the figurative and the abstract, Tahnee Lonsdale produces paintings that are intimate, agonised, tender and formidable. Developed through an intuitive process of drawing in response to particular emotional states, her canvases are populated by distinctively feminine forms whose swooping, structural physicality is an assertion of both power and vulnerability. Emotional experience is rendered as both private moment and public rite: a process in which interior life is turned outward and the individual self is split into multiple bodies entwined with or superimposed upon one another. Layering colour within restricted palettes, establishing depth through blocks and textures rather than gradations of tone, Lonsdale modulates acute autobiographical introspection into moments of collective affinity.

 

Tahnee Lonsdale (b. 1982, United Kingdom )lives and works in Los Angeles,   h