Joanna van Son: Intermission | General Assembly
Joanna van Son’s paintings, eight of which are collected in this show, draw from a wide range of inspirations, but are distinctively her own. She leaves big stretches of her unprimed linen canvases unpainted-on, save for scattered written notes that brought to mind Cy Twombly’s word paintings.
She uses thick impasto for the remainder, building up craggy mountains of oil paint, sometimes creamy-pink, sometimes with a livid orangey-red undertone that’s pure Frank Auerbach. The figures in this paint are reclining, voluptuous naked women. Odalisques.
Multiple canvases make up many of the works, and given their partially raw state, the stitched joins between them are clearly visible. Frankenstein’s monster style. An intermission means a break between parts. I took the exhibition’s title to be a reference to these adjoining canvases, and to the abrupt contrasts between the paint and the linen.
Portrait (2024)
I found the work both beautiful and moving, perhaps influenced by the lovely gallery, with its fancy panelling and large windows looking over at the pillars of St George’s church just opposite. The sun slanted in on the day I visited, capturing the hillocks of paint. The stitches in the canvas.
These awkward joins, bringing two canvases together, but not quite, are key to understanding the works. There’s a deeper, personal break that inspired them. Van Son lives on a different continent to her fiancé, who is the main subject of many of the works.
I originally thought the painting pictured above, Portrait, was a repeated self-portrait. The gallerist corrected me. It’s two different women, painted over and over, he said. They look very similar in real life. Togetherness, and physical intimacy, isn’t currently possible in real life, so instead, with cotton thread and fleshy swirls of thick oil paint, the artist makes it so.
Joanna van Son: Intermission is at General Assembly (London). 01 - 26 March 2025