That Which is Lost: Paintings | Naomi Grant

'In Naomi Grant’s recent paintings, the delicate foliage of a rose or the folds of a fan, the patina on a vase or the plumage of a jay, alerts us to the heightened beauty and determined fancy of impossibilia. Her canvases, which sometimes make their way into the pictures, form another plane in spaces that seem to compress and extend into some indefinite backstage. Here a door, a screen, a table, a frame, a window (or is it a painting?). Here the artist – or a picture of the artist within the picture – or perhaps not the artist at all, but her Hermione, stepping down from the pedestal, revealing nothing of the magic that brought her here.

As in Shakespeare’s play (The Winter's Tale), the dramatic effects – here the lusciousness of paint, the bravura richness of tones – don’t seek to deceive us with their verisimilitude but to move us. The vases of flowers Grant often returns to are perfectly balanced, just at the point of extreme brilliance, yet threatening to dissolve away again, to lose their form, or to wither and fade into their indeterminate settings. Their beauty is offset, made ambivalent, by the formal properties of their compositions.'