What I Have Held: Renata Pari-Lewis

Van Gogh was intoxicated by the “intense” landscapes and sunshine of Arles, in the south of France, when he took up residence in 1888. Renata Pari-Lewis, who arrived in the Provençal city in 2023, was excited to find a grand chateau lovingly restored to its former glory by a wealthy English financier. While Van Gogh was fleeing the gloom of the north, seeking the kind of clear, bright light he admired in Ukiyo-e prints, Pari-Lewis was far from her home in Sydney where one takes such light for granted.

From one exhibition to the next, Pari-Lewis has discovered that her preferred subject is a room in which every object, every detail tells a story about the occupant. The chateau that features in What I Have Held is the home of a collector who has filled it with paintings, tapestries, sculptures and antique furniture. It’s a personalised theatre assembled piece by piece, a time capsule of the ancien régime with all mod cons. In Pari-Lewis’s paintings the building becomes a stage without actors in which the furniture and objects play the starring roles.

When one thinks of the ways artists have depicted interiors over the centuries, most seem to have preferred still, empty spaces. In the rooms painted by the German Romantics there is almost always a figure lost in contemplation, and usually a window onto the outside world. In the 20th century, artists such as Vilhelm Hammershøi and Edward Hopper produced images of empty spaces in which the play of light takes on crucial significance. In such works we can’t help feeling that someone has just left the room or is set to make an entrance.

Pari-Lewis’s paintings are very different. She is not searching for that clear, limpid light that reveals every detail. On the contrary, she revels in the dark corners and shadows. In these pictures a window appears as a solid block of high-keyed colour in the midst of a cluttered space. It energises the rest of the composition, throwing light in the form of wristy swirls of paint onto the contents of a room. She works in a fluid, gestural manner, embracing abstract effects without ever letting go of recognisable forms. She may paint the wallpaper as a mass of flickering hieroglyphs, but its identity is never in doubt. A bust of the playwright Racine is wreathed in long strokes of paint in a vivid play of darkness and light. The backdrop, which may be a tapestry, takes on a fiery dimension.