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The circular paintings in this recent exhibition denote a new field of experiment for Marianne Baillieu. Previously confined to square or rectangular formats , her textured surfaces have manifest central, rising forms; referencing spiritual philosophy. At Lovegrove 's, Baillieu 's seductive, impasto fragments cohere across global canvases. Alchemical blue and gold dominate the three works. Extra-pictorial associations prevail: indexes of tangible physical gesture loaded with metaphors for universal and individual existence.
The received system of identity harnessed by Baillieu 's adoption of gestural abstraction attracts recontextualisation. Post-industrial discourse has defined expressionism as a spent project, aesthetic rather than disruptive, lacking value and credence in the 'authentic self' of the artist. Utopian transcendentalism and the sublime redemptive are counterparts to the appeal of hidden order and common underlying form in nature-all untenable clichés in many contemporary theories. Obsession with critical definition distorts Baillieu's confrontation with the canvas, the conduit of desire. The round canvases recuperate a female being-ness, a strength of identity existing for itself.
Coagulated coils of paint and smeared fingerprints trace the movement of desire across the skin of the canvas. Gesture circulates, fragments and resolves. Reading across the canvases, "all-over-ness" is refined into a lighter physical and colouristic touch, resisting centripetal/centrifugal movement. Baillieu has used her body to inscribe spatial territories which are not enclosed or encoded. Ignoring aesthetic hierarchies and the limitations of structured space, Baill ieu overcomes the impossibility of expression in a phallocentric order.
Logical systems of science and mathematics have historically inferred utopian constructions of form and space. Chaos theory destroyed the domination of symmetry, recognizing irregularity, the unpredictable. Boundaries between nature and artifice have become blurred and matters and bodies become abstracted in