GENEVIEVE FELIX REYNOLDS

EXHIBITION PRESS

For Genevieve Felix Reynolds, flattening and abstraction describe the process of painting. Her current body of work, plays on perspective, tricking the eye and prompting viewers to look twice.

Genevieve Felix Reynolds is a collector. Her items of interest range from antique figurines and kitsch crystal dolphins, to thick 1950s museum catalogues and online archives. “I have folders of images,” she says, both digital and analogue. These images are used to make collages, which are in turn used to compose her paintings. The dual use of the analogue and digital is significant, notes Felix Reynolds. “In relation to photography, the computer mimics the darkroom, but each technology forces you to think about composition differently . . . both are processes of flattening.”...

Felix Reynolds’s paintings combine the old and the new, which she says, “mimics my own mixed up folders and archives of images and objects, as well as the way in which I access this visual data online.” Composition with Ancient Fragment, 2021, combines a carved Gandharian schist from the third century with two trompe l’oeil paintings of images found online: a friend’s Instagrammed photo of a sawfish and Brancusi’s 1941 Bird in Space sculpture. The fish is held by someone just out of frame, and while the shape mimics the elegant curve of Bird in Space, the fish’s horrifyingly sharp “saw” nose extension is at odds with the “bird’s” smooth surface. The background “shelf” resembles an abstract with its off-centre stripe and daub of blue, further complicating the links between the seemingly disparate objects. The combination of these unlikely items recalls the curatorial experiments of Jean-Hubert Martin, who has long sought to challenge traditional museological classification strategies...

from ‘Genevieve Felix Reynolds: Abstracting the Archives’ by Lucy Hawthorne in Artist Profile, issue 57, p 52 - 56

Photograph Nicole Wong