.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
"The impact of Dawes meticulously painted coloured grids is immediate, they draw us into their depths, enveloping us like large swathes of woven material. Dawes has achieved this effect with great material labour that is revealed in the microscopic precision with which the oil paint is worked into, and over-painted on, every square centimetre of even the large canvases. There is also a laborious logic at work in this show, a logic that insists on taking this materially as its starting point, upon setting it to work against the symbolic order imposed by the geometry of the grid form...
Dawes' paintings produce their effect by teasing the very perceptual impulses that perspectival grids stabilize when they mimic the optical projection of the human occular field. Dawes uses everything at her disposal: light, shade, colour, repetition and rhythm to direct our attention simultaneously towards opposing poles of visual signification. Our gaze is caught, running between figure and ground, depth and surface, focal point and visual continuum." (E. Lindsay, op.cit., 1988)
Dawes' paintings produce their effect by teasing the very perceptual impulses that perspectival grids stabilize when they mimic the optical projection of the human occular field. Dawes uses everything at her disposal: light, shade, colour, repetition and rhythm to direct our attention simultaneously towards opposing poles of visual signification. Our gaze is caught, running between figure and ground, depth and surface, focal point and visual continuum." (E. Lindsay, op.cit., 1988)