Lara Feldman

In gestural compositions described in oil, Lara Feldman (b.1972, Cape Town) notates ephemeral scenes and the likenesses of friends and strangers. Her often fragmented impressions appear as if mediated by memory imperfectly recalled – at times unsettling, even haunting, at others pervaded by the soft light of nostalgia. Faces shift between detailed portraits and redacted anonymity; once-familiar landscapes become indistinct. Feldman’s paintings are notable for their quality of colour, which transcribes her subjects in tones real, imagined and intuitively felt. Together, the artist’s impressionistic style and palette lend her paintings psychological potential and gesture to the elusive essence of the places and people she pictures. That she works from photographs is seldom apparent; her formal propositions favouring emotional resonance above matters of realism. Rather than mimic photography’s immediacy, she pursues those qualities shared by scenes remembered – the sense of distance, the softening of details, a mood ambient and dreamlike. The close crop of her compositions invites the viewer into intimate proximity with the painted subjects; each an echo, one imagines, from Feldman’s interior repertoire of images. More recently, the artist has extended her practice to include monochromatic ink studies and trace prints.  

Feldman lives and works in London.