Grand Illusions: Grace Wright

In her most recent series, Grand Illusions, Grace Wright continues to push the boundaries of her distinct gestural language. Within these works, through layers of acrylic paint, passages of bare canvas, and refined, intuitive brushwork, Wright creates multi-planar compositions that give a sense of impressive depth, stretching back from the picture plane. Although, as in previous work, Wright incorporates such Baroque elements as strong diagonal lines, dynamism and chiaroscuro, her latest inquiries also take learnings from quantum physics, seeking to broaden our limited, instinctive understanding of time and space, and foster a sense of awe at the invisible forces around us. The paintings in Wright’s Grand Illusions series thus present the viewer with different temporal realities, whether a sense of expansive, protracted time as in Great Cosmology, or the sense of immediacy and rapidity embodied by Geometrical Reality. Wright’s landscape composition A Description of the Sky seems to offer us a progression of moments or the passing of time. Its narrative unfolds from left to right, day into night, like an ancient Greek frieze or a comic book strip.

All of these works’ titles are derived from writings by Ancient Greek philosopher Democritus. Working in the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE, Democritus and fellow atomist Leucippus propounded a materialist view of the natural world, submitting that the world was made up of two realities: atoms and void. The vast majority of Democritus’ extensive writings have not survived, but some of his ideas, and the topics on which he wrote, are available to us through other sources. Most of the paintings in Wright’s Grand Illusions series adopt the titles of some of Democritus’ lost books, paying homage to the ancient atomist and his pioneering philosophising on the make-up of the universe. But the title of The Truth is in the Depths is rather taken from a surviving fragment of Democritus’ writings: ‘In reality we know nothing; for the truth is in the depths.’ Such a quotation offers a strong sense of what Wright explores in Grand Illusions: how she might open up new dimensions in her canvas or make visible the powerful forces which we cannot normally see.

Within each composition, Wright deploys her impressive range of brush marks, spanning the accidental and spontaneous to the carefully crafted. Along with the bold, sweeping strokes that punctuate the canvas and demand the viewer’s eye, she makes great use of finer, more delicate touches of her brush, further enhancing the atmospheric quality of her paintings. In several works, too, viewers will find distinctive multi-coloured ‘s’ shapes, which Wright achieves by pushing her brush, often loaded with several colours at once, against the canvas, and twisting her wrist as she moves it across the picture plane. Particularly in this series, Wright’s sensitively attuned mark making results in unified compositions, where brushstrokes travel across planes, and foreground, midground and background fuse into one. Owing to her sensitive combination of light and dark, Wright’s compositions feel metallic, even cosmic, in colour. Drawing heavily on blues, oranges and browns, the works in this series exhibit a unified colour palette, even if individual compositions push this palette in different directions. Whereas the deep, dark browns and blues of Circumnavigation of the Ocean recall the abyssal depths of the sea, Cosmography draws on an ethereal combination of cloud white, pastel green and purple, disrupted by small marks of rich brown.

As with previous bodies of work, in Grand Illusions Wright probes the slippage between representation and abstraction. At once, the viewer encounters abstract, gestural brushwork on these canvases, but might also find a Baroque riot of figures and fabrics in Wright’s imagery, replete with soaring birds or flying putti. The mind oscillates between the two, teasing figurative forms out of Wright’s mark making. Wright is not exempt from this: in the centre of the composition of The Truth is in the Depths, she sees in her brushstrokes a grandiose mirror with an ornate Baroque frame. The largest painting in the series, The Truth is in the Depths is mounted on the East wall of Gow Langsford’s flagship Onehunga gallery. In its portrait orientation and monumental scale, the work reads like a devotional altarpiece, towering over the viewer and, again, inspiring a sense of awe. The majority of the works in this series, though, are on a human scale, meaning they envelop the viewer, folding them into the composition and the illusionary world Wright creates within.

Also included in the exhibition are a series of studies Wright executed in the initial stages of the series, while based in the South of France. Painted in oil, these intimate studies are distinct from the grand monumentality of Wright’s finished works. Whereas the viewer is immersed in the compositions of the hung canvases, Wright’s smaller works on paper are mounted on plinths, encouraging the viewer to lean over, and peer down on the works, as one might examine a laboratory specimen or an archival display in a museum vitrine. Yet, there is also a clear conversation between the preliminary studies and finished works, especially in Wright’s use of Titian blue, which dominates the studies and reappears in several of the Grand Illusions canvases. For Wright, these studies function like science fiction portals, or whirling vortexes, drawing us down into the world below.

Wright sees herself as a voyager, her subconscious travelling through time and space as she paints. She explains, ‘I feel as if I am bringing something through from somewhere else. It’s like stepping into a deeper experience of the world where I am trying to describe what I see and feel. This impulse travels through me and into the work, guiding my decisions. It’s a transcendent experience and I often feel like my work comes through me, rather than from me.’ With this, Wright connects herself to a lineage of abstract painters channelling their spirituality or mysticism through their practice. And owing to this impulsive, sometimes reflexive application of paint onto canvas, the end result can be surprising even to Wright, picturing something she couldn’t have previously imagined.

Essay by Victoria Munn