ABOUT
ABOUT
Roxana Halls is a London-based painter who deploys spectacle, humour, lurid narrative and an uncanny glamour to delineate a volatile erotic and political Imaginary. Balancing a visionary extravagance with formal rigour, her paintings offer a refutation of reified class and gender tropes in scenarios ranging from the oneiric to the cinematic. The representation of women is at the centre of Halls’s practice though she rarely devises a direct portrait - models play fictional protagonists, mannequins play living women and the artist plays herself in a range of roles. Everywhere in her practice the pictorial subject is intensified, dramatised and estranged.
Intellectually, Halls is drawn to the anthropological concept of bricolage in which ideas, narratives and artefacts are constructed from the tools and materials at hand. She cites a range of influences and preoccupations: true crime; Weimar subcultures; experimental and neo-noir film; the 18th century picaresque; folk horror; the laughing figures of the Dutch Baroque; post-structural feminism; clothes, wigs and miscellaneous discarded things.
Her work has an aesthetic quality that is ravishing but not always ‘tasteful’. The paintings are characterised by artifice and charged atmospheres: many are knowingly in danger of being too much - a quality which consciously speaks to her experience of working class and queer identity.
Some paintings dramatise stillness while others freeze-frame moments of incendiary action. All evoke the visual cathexes of memory and want.
Portrait by EMMA SLAYMAKER