Downsides Up, Insides Out, Mel Brown, Praxis Artspace November-December 2023

Mel Brown’s figurative paintings seduce us into their narrative worlds through lush surfaces and captivating subjects. These subjects, skaters, dancers, a music box ballerina, often loom out of dark grounds, fully employing the chiaroscuro drama of oil painting tradition. Skilful and laborious painting techniques render fragmented moments, freezing these figures in time. Caught in their stories, they invite viewers to momentarily inhabit these worlds with them.

In the exhibition, Downsides Up, Insides Out at Praxis Artspace, five large scale oil paintings are displayed on black walls, spot lit, intensifying their glowing warmth and fleshy tones. The title of this group of paintings evokes a sense of disorientation, a topsy-turvy world where gravity and our expectations are defied. The sense of shifting space and blurred boundaries is intensified as, across the series of paintings, two figures enact a range of poses and positions, each body relating to and interacting with the other in various forms of embrace and encounter. Space is made strange as in Juxtapose, 2023, we look down on dramatically foreshortened figures, seated together in a painterly ground.

Mel writes that ‘human experience is at the heart of my work.’ In this series she also uses perspective, distortion and the intermingling of body and space to pose questions of perception, ‘highlighting the disparity between how the world seems and how it is.’ There is a sense of the artist directing the figures, moving them about the confined space of the picture plain as she moves pigment around with the brush, manipulating bodies and light. These bodies, holding, bracing, in motion and at rest, might lead viewers to consider their own body’s knowledge, their phenomenological experience of being in the world and of being with each other.

                                                                                                                        Dr Zoe Freney
                                                                                                                       Arts educator & artist