CLARE THACKWAY

****Having exhibited widely in Australia and France, the Paris-based artist is known for taking a narratively fragmented approach to contemporary painting, carefully withholding the entire story. The sheer beauty of the imagery and evocative feelings can be appreciated with curiosity in these mise-en-scenès, along with the many meanings implied.

At heart, ‘Hold Tight’ is a suite of richly psychological works of its subjects’ inner lives, riffing on the tradition of portraiture and Christian iconography with through the female gaze, with detours into psychology theories and the lived experiences of its subjects: friends, mothers, grandmothers, children, and the artist herself. On a naked body, a golden snake slithers forth, a form of imagery that alludes to female banishment and shame in the bible and transformation and enigma in the Chinese zodiac. Here the snake is reclaimed toward renewal, as though Eve is stepping out of paradise toward a more empowering – though uncertain – future. Held hands signal interdependence. Bruised oils are washed like watercolours and diaphanous silks carry entangled silhouettes in fluid magentas and blues.

Conventions of Western painting recur, but always with a twist: draped fabrics and crumpled blankets conceal and reveal bodies in suggestive folds, and stripes, once historically deemed diabolical and disordered, pulsate optically to point to the clashes in our collective inheritance.

The subjects of Thackway’s portraits are vulnerable and interlocking; eras of life melt into one another across generations. Their gravity-laden bodies are entwined in love and tension, in uncomfortable arrangements of human need and family relations. These are images of giving and taking, needing and being needed, serving and being served, wanting love and reciprocation, reaching out and catching.