Twisting bodies and undulating flesh, all smooshing and sploodging into half-abstract semi-chaos: you know what you’re getting with Christina Quarles. The American painter has a distinct visual language, one you maybe saw at the South London Gallery in 2021 or the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 2020. It’s all limbs and skin, contorting and writhing.
But it’s not a limiting set of art parameters, as she proves in this new body of work in the huge, swanky new Pilar Corrias space in Mayfair. Because her once serious, dark, emotional exploration of identity through the human nude is now flooded with heat and light. A throbbing, red and orange sun bakes the skin of all the figures in the first work you see, choking the canvas in yellow humidity and grey smog. A pool ripples in another, a moment of cool, easy relief. There are vast blue skies, shimmering summer flowers. Bright patterns are swimsuits and summer dresses, or psychedelic terrazzo that seems to mutate into skin.
The bodies still dominate, still intermingle and morph, but they’re languid and lounging, swimming, caressing, holding. It’s all sultry, sensual summer love.
Quarles is pushing the clash of textures and techniques more than ever, mixing washed-out watercolour with sharp lines, thick oils, patterns and flat planes.
Some of the paintings feel rushed, unfinished, still wet, but the rest of the show’s great (especially the smaller, denser, more intense works on paper downstairs), an explosion of joy, sensuality and summer heat, a bit of warmth just as the weather starts to turn. .