Luminous Solitude

Charlotte Brisland

What’s emptier than an uninhabited landscape? An uninhabited landscape featuring an empty house, as Charlotte Brisland’s paintings do. They evoke places that are no place, but a hybrid of real and imagined locations researched by the artist, in the vein of Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. Scenes spotlighted with shadowplay – formed of the uncanny splicing of dark and light – create heightened drama in the absence of human figures in Brisland’s work. Colours that strike one as transposed from TV amplify the sense of slipping between the literal and virtual. All this happens in the context of attenuated space: a background or medium that seems uncompressed by gravitational pull.