Mythra Schwartz:Light Caress

Through her work, Schwartz seeks to respond to the question: can a surface be looked at in the way a body is touched? For this exhibition, the artist works with a reduced, and often monochromatic, colour palette rendering reflective vessels, shadows, and fragments of the figure in sensuous, tactile forms. Playing with the scale of her objects, such as jugs, vases, candles, and glasses, Schwartz allows them to exist between utility and attraction.

Removing the functionality of these everyday items, Schwartz considers how they may become charged with desire through the act of looking itself. Marxist theories posit the fetishisation of objects of mass consumption becomes amplified through visual media, in particular the proliferation of advertising. Schwartz’ draws from similar sources in her work as well as film stills and imagery from public and her personal archives, however, she complicates these through an obfuscation of the object: botanical forms are represented in shadow rather than directly translated to canvas, embracing figures are overlaid with precisely rendered depictions of cutlery, and objects are suspended in ambiguous spaces. Schwartz is interested in images that resist immediate consumption, allowing the works to linger in a state of partial visibility and refuted resolution; in doing so, she negates the impulse for fixed meaning. This effect is heightened through her soft, diffused brushstrokes which decelerate our encounters with the artist’s subjects.

In Light Caress, Schwartz queries whether desire exists as an inherent quality of an object – or image of an object – instead approaching it as a condition for looking and a manifestation of our drive to consume visual imagery. Desire settles on the surface of her work, charged and accumulated through a prolonged engagement with the painting and our sustained attention.