Your parents told you that if you got too close to the TV your eyes would go square, but no one warns you about what happens when you get too close to a painting. What happens is Mary Ramsden’s show, where everything is blown out, fuzzy and hazy.
The English abstract artist was last seen flirting dangerously, but successfully, with figuration in recent years, but these latest works are a return to full on, no compromise abstraction. They’re big washed out colourfields, drenched in lilac and soft, sunny yellow. They look like she’s zoomed in microscopically-close on a tiny segment of a Pierre Bonnard or Edouard Vuillard painting, something impressionistically bright, then blown up that minuscule view to monumental size.
The canvases mash together splashy washes of pigment with precise little squares of thickly marked paint to create abstract landscapes. It’s all about texture, surface, these moments of intense daubing mixed with empty, calm spaces. Seen from a distance they become one big gradient; up close they’re filled with tiny detail.
The pieces that don’t work feel a bit like a freshly plastered wall, but the good ones almost seem to hum, vibrate with colour, with allusions to art history, with gestures and textures.
Despite being bigger than a lot of her other work, they’re somehow subtler, they take longer to make sense to your eyes. They’re like enforced glaucoma, a blanket of fuzz wrapping your eyeballs, like Ramsden has spent way too long staring way too close at these canvases, and wants you to do the same too.
