Plinth

Time and again, through Big Babe, Sleeper, Baby Blue, Great Thigh, Babe, sumptuous brushstrokes become edematous infant heads that appear vulnerable, soft — a bit sore? — and a bit threatening. Psychoanalysts could have a field day discussing the smorgasbord of nude bodies and swollen heads in Stanley’s work, but such readings would prove hot air (pun intended). Her canvases seem less interested in psychological acuity than fun, physiological eventfulness: lift, drag, embodiment and emotion. Yes, the viewer could plumb the depths of these uncanny bodies, but just as many signs invite her to skim across their bright, floaty surfaces.

The swollen heads are, Stanley says, ‘quite horrible.’ Yet, at the same time, ‘some of them that have a face really gazing out of big cheeks- I don't know, there's something about big, fat faces I find quite moving in a way I couldn't fully explain.’ To be sure, these paintings embody all kinds of ambiguity. ‘The big head is this thing that's somewhere between an adult and infant,’ Stanley says. The ‘idea of this incredibly heavy, blood-filled head that can't even lift itself’ is no doubt grotesque, and all the same, ‘it's soft – kind of like the inside skin of your wrist, that’s never seen the light. It's this sensuous but incredibly flopping thing that is vastly stretched out, taking up and drinking in vast amounts of attention, but without even being aware – I was interested in the weakness but also the absorption of that.’

Floppy things stretched out taking up baffling amounts of people’s attention – the description could just as easily apply to artists’ canvases. ‘All paintings are about painting to some degree,’ Stanley says, and hers certainly have a skin-of-your-wrist way of demanding attention. ‘One of the reasons I started making big emotional paintings of reclining nudes was, in a way, because I thought it was the most embarrassing thing I could do.’ A bit like a poet reaching for a hard-not-to-clang rhyming couplet, leaning into the most ‘obvious, unsophisticated, unnuanced’ trope she could think of was a way of releasing herself from her self-consciousness as an art student. ‘It has to feel risky.’ For sure, there is no room for posturing when you have backed yourself into a corner and have to paint your way out of it.

The tradition of the nude might be overwrought, but so are the naked bodies Stanley depicts. ‘There's often an awkwardness and a weighted, self-conscious, uncomfortableness in the bodies that I'm depicting. I'm not like, “oh, a wrinkled man, isn't that embarrassing?” It's a combination of an interest in going to a place that feels too obvious, but also a real interest in these dynamics, in wanting to make paintings that have an emotional impact.’

A painting called Tropo pushes the obviousness even further, Stanley says, by embellishing the canvas with flowers, as a woman takes a bath-height step away from the viewer. The title of this work was shared by her solo exhibition at Incubator in 2023 and ‘can mean to change or turn and she's swivelling and turning away,’ Stanley says. ‘It could be short for tropology, which is a figure of speech, and my Australian friend told me it also means to go crazy in the heat. I was also just thinking about the Italian word troppo, which is spelt differently but means “too much”.’ Stanley is attracted to this sense of excessiveness. ‘It’s this quite careful balancing act to manage, because things can go too far and it doesn't land. So it's about maintaining the slight tension between things being just on the edge – just the right tension.’

On view now at Lisson Gallery, as part of its group exhibition of cross-generational painters Accordion Fields, Big Watcher shares Tropo’s clivia tones. A green figure lies prone, turned away from the viewer. An orange figure is depicted from above drastically foreshortened, distorted a couple notches shy of Holbein’s skull. Orange and green blotches animate the composition, albeit vaguely, as if seen through a wet windscreen. All these jarring elements, as Stanley suggests, should be way too much – melodramatic, disjointed – and yet in an otherwise airy canvas they hold ‘just the right tension’.

‘I'm interested in drawing a viewer in by any means I can,’ Stanley says. ‘I think colour and material are very key to that – bringing the viewer into this quite high-pitch, uneasy world.’ Another work at Lisson sees a male nude aerily pale against jetstream blue, reclining while in freefall or in utero. Joke (2023) flirts with a #cosmoandwanda pink and green palette, while other colours wouldn’t be out of place in a pack of macaroons. ‘There's a painting by Pierre Bonnard that I really love, called Young Women in the Garden. Again, it's the plainest subject for a painting, but it’s this high, sundrenched hot day, and the colours pull you into it, but then it's actually quite sickening – there's this sense of lurching once you're in. I find colour really interesting when it works like that – when it can draw you in with its bright vividness and then it's a bit more agitated once you’re in there.’

But why is the viewer being lured into this unsettled world in the first place? ‘I want the painting to be like a gaze, and a gaze is this thing that amplifies certain elements and other things drop away. Therefore it's this very biassed sense of looking where things are warped or emotion is bending things – the idea that our resentment or anticipation or whatever is polluting our view and bending things out of shape.’

Of course, bias is all too human. But when so much of our looking happens frictionlessly online, inside our echo chambers, impartiality feels dodo-like. Algorithmic curation is as good an analogy as any for the methods by which Stanley’s paintings funnel the viewer down one biased perspective, only to pop the filter bubble and reveal a contradictory one. Multiple paintings depict a woman from above, such that the viewer feels by turns crammed in, occupying the position of a pervy shower head, or completely the opposite, intimate and innocent, like a parent looking down at their child’s head.

‘The reason I first started doing these women from above is because I had been doing these little, little agitated female figures against these big vast male figures with these big swollen heads,’ Stanley says. ‘It was a way for me to play around with that, just from switching the perspective. If you swivel the viewpoint, suddenly she does have a massive head, just because of the perspective shift. So it started as a kind of internal joke for myself, almost like a pun on the other paintings.

‘But I find that even though you're above her head, you're really in her head with these paintings,’ she says. ‘It's a way of almost being her thoughts, floating, in this mad way.’ Stanley is ever interested in ‘how clouded our vision is’ as we move through the world. She makes us look at how bad we can be at looking. She makes too much seem like not enough. How does she get away with it? Stanley lures us into an uneasy world so that when this one lurches it seems a little easier.

By Sammi Gale

See available works by Elinor Stanley