Emma Puntis: Wednesdays Child

For the fourth exhibition in the 2009 programme Supplement presents painting and works on paper by Emma Puntis.

Puntis addresses the concerns of portraiture through a diverse engagement with the act of painting. In her paintings and drawings a sense of the figurative emerges through the negotiation of the boundaries between description and abstraction. The show consists of a variety of works that explore the ground that lies between the representational and material nature of painting.

In our perception of the world the face exists as a unique and privileged site of visual coding, a singular site of communicative power in which the nuances and complexities of expression take on vast significance. Puntis' paintings play on this significance in the way that recognisable features, such as the eyes, lips and nose remain identifiable yet contain a certain painterly ambiguity that leads them towards abstraction.

Within Puntis' portraits and works on paper a tension is held through a distancing of the materiality of paint and the recognition of its subject. Puntis playfully applies the constraints of portraiture to experiment with the ways meaning and content is constructed. In these paintings formal decisions are arrived at through an intuitive response to each stage of the painting's individual process of becoming. Each painting maintains its specificity whilst allowing for a complex and subjective interpretation.

In 2008 Puntis completed the Triangle Workshop residency in DUMBO, New York. Recent exhibitions include Jerwood Contemporary Painters, 2009 and The Painting Room, Transition Gallery, 2008

Emma Puntis
Wednesday's Child