Renata Pari-Lewis’ artworks are profound, evocative investigations into the spaces we live in. Intimate is an exhibition about the domestic—of the context of home and the familiar. The artist leads her viewer into constructed rooms filled with forms of the ‘everyday’. Through whiplash brushstrokes, the suggested sweeping arch of a chair, the eclipse of a vacant vase, are intrinsically known. Even bold stampings of circular forms are obtuse, abstracted but for our association to colour. Cézanne pears and Matisse apples become instantly apparent, tritely familiar—almost survey markers to a pictorial scape; foreign to all but to the imaginings of Pari-Lewis and the occupier we never see…

It’s in this moment, Pari-Lewis allows us to superimpose our own narrative within the frame created by ‘the artist’. Metaphors abound, the translucent glow from a window casts light over objects collected by a tenant who has taken up residence in our imagination. Her ‘interiors’ ultimately become portraits of those who voyeuristically inhabit them, created in the half light of realism and expressionism.

Intimate is the first body of work to be exhibited by Renata Pari-Lewis at Nanda\Hobbs. Earlier this year Pari-Lewis was a finalist in the prestigious Portia Geach Memorial Award for portraiture—a follow up to her success in 2019 as a Semi-finalist in the Darling Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.

Eloise Cato
November, 2020