Paintings that demand to be encountered and confronted in person
Slipping Through Skin is Louise Howard’s new body of work, a collection that interrogates portraiture through a marriage of the naturalistic and the abstract. Across these large-scale canvases, Howard attempts to visualise not only the facade of identity, but the unstable and shifting interior spaces of the mind itself, writes Leo Dunlop.
Speaking to Louise, she cited Lucian Freud as a major early influence: “In my early years as an artist I guess I was just trying to be Lucian Freud, trying to capture the essence of his work in my portraits.” That influence remains visible in the fleshy realism of the faces, yet these works no longer feel indebted to imitation. Instead, they announce an artist confident in their own visual language and style.
Throughout the collection, hyper-realistic faces emerge from canvases overtaken by abstraction. Eyes glance outward, at once inviting and withholding connection from the viewer who can’t quite meet their outward stare. Around them, forms fracture into blocks of colour, gestural brushstrokes and textural depth. It feels as though the portraits themselves have been invaded, vandalised by the colours of thought, memory or emotion.
Howard’s use of collage further destabilises the portraits. Newspaper fragments, cut-out eyes and layered materials scatter across the surfaces, giving the works a tactility that draws the viewer deeper into the image. The longer you spend with the paintings, the more details begin to emerge from within them: a mouse hidden in the corner, a cigarette almost burnt out, an untouched chessboard waiting for a game. They function as clues for the viewer, inviting us to fill in the gaps and connect these fractured spaces and forms. In doing so, we are forced to bring our own inner lives into conversation with the world Howard has constructed before us.
What proves most compelling is the way Howard uses abstraction itself as a vocabulary for interiority. The volatile brushwork and shifting planes of colour surrounding the faces begin to feel less like background and more like manifestations of the subject’s psyche. The paintings are not simply portraits of people, but portraits of consciousness itself.
Louise Howard’s work ultimately feels confident and formally ambitious. These are paintings that demand to be encountered and confronted in person to be fully experienced.
General Assembly, 12 St. George Street, London, W1S 2FB. 12-3pm. Ends Sunday 24th May.
Website: https://louisehowardart.com/product-category/slipping-through-skin/
