Lydia Blakeley
Lydia Blakeley’s subject matter is, quite simply, the world around her. The paintings are her observations of what surrounds her, often first translated through the screen of her camera-phone or her laptop, and then translated once more into the medium of paint. More subtly though, her works are about a particular form of looking at the world, and that is through the filter of aspiration. Her subject-matter ranges from seemingly perfect holiday scenes, mid-century modernist home decoration, the perfect smile, hip food and drinks, streetwear and even the esoteric world of best-in-show pets.
Blakeley zooms in on a new way of presenting ourselves that has thrived in recent years. This is often via our smartphones and platforms such as Instagram where subjects pretend to present themselves in an honest or neutral light, but are often self-positioning, showing off. or subtly (or not) attaching themselves to the latest desirable item, trend or look. Particular scenes or memes become a hot trend that often passes a few weeks later, and there is an unspoken race in the act of attaching one’s image to that moment. Through the act of painting this very contemporary process, Blakeley slows and stills this phenomenon. Her paintings make still the rapid and overwhelming welter of desirable phenomena that we are bombarded with on our screens.
Blakeley often close crops a particular part of the image that she is working from, and then starts with a pink underpainting. From there she makes a chalk pastel sketch on top of the underpainting, adds a wash of colour, and then returns to work on details. There is an evenness to the surface of her paintings that results from the consistency of this technique but this process also brings out a certain evenness of gaze that is dispassionate, deadpan and cool.
Since completing her MFA at Goldsmiths College in 2019 her career has progressed strongly; from group shows to solo shows at commercial galler-ies, and from her first major institutional group show at the Hayward Gallery (curated by Ralph Rugoff) in 2021, to her first institutional solo last year at Southwark Park Galleries. She is currently showing at "Present Tense' at Hauser & Wirth Somerset and will have her third solo show at Niru Ratnam in Autumn this year.