Fate (detail)
2013 by Robina Doxi
Chelsea College of Art MA Show 2013
Among the tantalising selection of work in the Chelsea College MA show, Robina Doxi was an artist who resonated, with her large and inky canvases. Expansive and varied in medium, Doxi’s works appear as dreamscapes; with subjects varied in scale, they are patterned out through the composition, pulled into focus using different colours and techniques. The soft and mottled background encourages a hazy and fantastical atmosphere, where ideas and images float, as if through one’s head, in diluted ‘unreal’ colours. Doxi says she is influenced by the great Klimt (see postcard 28) and one feels this when gazing at her paintings; her images evoke the feeling of quiet meditation, of emotion melting into pattern before our eyes. Delicate circles and lines create constellation-like forms that guide our view through the work, as if we are picking our way through someone’s imagination. Narrative is present but open to interpretation, as dreams are, with fragments of subject caught between abstract shapes. In Fate a long angular line, dotted with an inky row of flags, reveals lightly drawn houses; fading and incomplete, they multiply as a distant memory, cloaked in the expanding hair of the figure, whose cloudy grey strands glow with pin pricks, as stars in a night sky. Rippling across the composition, these images are divided by juxtaposing and bold shapes of colour, black and yellow, that stand solid and disconcerting between the surreal depths of the painting. Using abstraction, mark making and colour, Doxi creates a visualisation of both emotion and memory, absorbing our attention and inviting different interpretations.
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