Daisy Richardson: We Were All Made In Burning Stars art review – Surrealism at the brink
The artist's work transforms familiar interiors into unstable spaces shaped by geology, astronomy and the looming possibility of erasure
Daisy Richardson’s ‘Meteor Reflection’ shows a glass of water against a flat grey-brown background, with what looks at first like a little waterborne arthropod swimming across its surface. The clue of the title, however, helps us to realise that this is not a shrimp or a pond skater, but the reflection of a burning meteor overhead. This is one of the exciting things that abstract art can do: pare away detail until we’re left with a set of elementary features that can send interpretation skating off in radical directions, to the miniature or the sublime, the humble or the destructive.
A painter and sculptor, Richardson works with the legacies of surrealism while bringing in allusions to geology and geological time, atomic and microscopic geometries, and the voids beyond human understanding. Her current show at Beacon Arts Centre features paintings, drawings and collages on paper, many set in what seem like stripped-out or ruined domestic interiors, replete with minimalist tables, chairs, taps and storage units. Strange monoliths float in the centre-ground or engulf items of furniture. A cupboard is overgrown with columns and spires of basalt; a kitchen faucet clings to the fragment of a star floating through nothingness.
Paul Nash, Meret Oppenheim and René Magritte are all touchstones for the artist. The use of vanishing-point perspective to articulate bare architectural forms and spaces is a little Giorgio de Chirico, and also alludes to renaissance artists such as il Sassetta and Fra Angelico. The effect of all this is to suggest a kind of nagging apocalypse anxiety, an intimation of great forces that might erase or fracture the structures and objects that order our lives. In an age of ecological destruction and crumbling international order, this has a subtle geopolitical resonance, but in good surrealist style the work skirts around any specific topical reference. Strange and rewarding stuff.
Daisy Richardson: We Were All Made In Burning Stars is on at Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock, until Saturday 14 February.