startartfair.com
VIP Preview I Wednesday 14th September, 3pm - 9pm
Christine Park Gallery is proud to participate in START Art Fair 2016, held at one of London's most prestigious venues, the Saatchi Gallery. For our second consecutive year participating in the fair we will present a solo booth project of new paintings by British artist Cara Nahaul.
In her most recent paintings, Cara Nahaul continues to challenge existing narratives and stereotypes about the tropics, this time using the landscapes of domestic interiors and gardens as a starting point to re-examine the idea of the exotic.
For this body of work, Nahaul has drawn from a diverse range of sources. Trawling through architectural and lifestyle magazines for images of holiday homes and luxurious garden designs the paintings allude to the projected fantasies from these glossy pages. Many of the paintings are composites of images found in these sources, as well as places visited on the artist's own travels. What is being viewed could be an Andalusian villa, a Moroccan public garden or even a visit to a local garden centre in London.
In her exploration of these spaces, Nahaul dissolves the boundaries between interior and exterior by painting spaces in bold colours, flattening large surfaces or increasing the number of vanishing points, all while embellishing and decorating them with tropical flora. At times it is unclear in the paintings whether we are viewing the same space from numerous angles or if we are zooming into a corner of a room.
The spaces are fabricated using abstracted planes and volume in order to create landscapes that remain for the most part empty. Inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's cinematic device the MacGuffin, the objects within the paintings point to a narrative yet its full function is never clearly explained. Like the places visited on Nahaul's travels or flicking through magazines, these are places that inspire but are not necessarily habitable or even physically accessible.
In her exploration of these spaces, Nahaul suggests that the tropics need not be discovered in exotic distant lands but rather they can be located somewhere much closer to home, if not home itself. For the artist, the tropics are not merely a fantastical holiday destination but an interior psychological landscape as well. By creating fictional spaces, Nahaul comments on how we project desires onto the exotic and foreign, and enquires about the source of those desires.
