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Critics  |
"Melanie Goemans' paintings implicate cartographic or anatomical interests with natural elements that are difficult to pin down. Whether describing the passage of water or the organic matrices of trees, she combines them with not a small degree of romanticism. Like Fra Angelico's cell drawings at San Marco, they have a quality born from the physical space in which they are shown. Most recently, Melanie has made quiet painterly interventions to shore up a tentative belief in natural systems underpinning an otherwise un-mappable city. Consumed by construction and speed, the city nevertheless hides scores of precious spaces that allow personal reflection and escapist fantasy. Melanie looks for these elusive moments through drawing memories of such places. In photographing trees planted as public memorials to loved ones the resulting canopies are photocopied, projected and traced as shadows, the spaces between the reaching branches making their own self-conscious gesture painstakingly filled in with flat, delicate tones. They are resistant to the demands of making work in public, their progression slow, the direction sure. They could almost be temporary, but while fixed on their canvas supports are an overview, an approximation, using drawing, rather than painting, to create a faint memory of the artist's relationship to nature." Extract taken from Catalogue Essay |