LARA JULIAN | Optical Adventures: 10 years of painting colour
In Lara Julian's paintings, colour is never static, but shifts constantly in pulsating strands of paint that reverberate against one another, as if in perpetual motion. The artist has said of her work, "I'm playing with perception, I'm playing with movement, with rhythm, and with composition". Colour is the uniting force in her work, which, she explains, "is developed from the materiality of colour ... I seek to visualise colour as matter and energy through a systematic exploration of colour systems."
For the past 6 years, Julian has pursued this exploration through the formal idiom of painted lines, a choice that situates her within an artistic historical lineage including Bridget Riley, Patrick Heron and Carlo Cruz-Diez, whose dynamic painting Physichromie DDC 1, 1981, provides the inspiration for Lara's work B.P-B.B-G.7.7.019-21.
But while Heron used stripes because they are empty of meaning, so enhancing "the concentration upon the experiences of colour itself", Julian, like Riley and Cruz-Diez, sees colour not as an isolated sensory function, but as a loaded core human experience, all the time accruing - generations of historical and cultural baggage.
Some sense of this complexity of meaning is reflected in the development of Lara Julian's work over the past decade. This period forms the focus of this exhibition, and begins with her time as an art student, first in New York, and then at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.
Interestingly, it is not just her affinity with colours, but her treatment of lines that contributes to the evolution of her current style. Her now familiar meditative strokes, sometimes long, sometimes short, but always vertical, are preceded in much earlier paintings by looser, descriptive and more circular gestures.
The exhibition is accompanied by an essay from the art critic and writer Florence Hallett, a regular contributor to The I newspaper, The New European, and The Daily Telegraph among others. She says: 'Lara Julian's paintings provide both a refuge for the eyes and mind, and an intellectual puzzle for the viewer. She questions the nature of painting and sculpture, not just as material entities, but as experiences: on one hand she creates experiments in perception, but just as persuasively she mines the notion of colour as a repository of cultural and historical memory'.
