Andrew Mansfield

Mansfield’s paintings are both portraits and not portraits. Manifestly they are representations of the female face but the image is initially derived from the media and the subjects are anonymous. The women depicted are effectively sales props in their original context and are sought out for their neutral and formal qualities. However, through making a painting of beauty out of their suspended presence the artist invests them with a personality and a role that is powerful, unsettling and unquestionably also alien.

Initially, the source images are extracted, re-copied and the basic form and features translated to the canvas in monochrome. Only when the structure of the image is established is the colour applied in thin glazes, like a skin applied to a mask, the sophistication and subtlety of the modelling just pushing the images far enough to inhabit a space between the graphic and the three dimensional. There are oddities in the features, eyes of different hue, lips with a hint of a twist, a variation in depth of detail. There is a variety of expressions from a distant blankness to the inquisitive, aloof and confrontational. But finally, these paintings are not an exploration of character but a reduction of the elements of female physiognomy, assembled with minimal means into a pictorial representation of an idealised beauty.

Mansfield first exhibited at the gallery in 1985. He is also represented in Paris by Galerie Anne de Villepoix and his work is in many important collections in Europe and the USA.

Pressetext

Andrew Mansfield