Lisa Milroy at Waddington - London, England - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

For all that she looks to be playing predictable postmodern games with representation, Lisa Milroy is a genuinely enigmatic painter. Her paintings can be virtuoso at the same time flat-footed; intensely observed yet blithely illustrational; imbued with poetic calm however deadpan.

In her earlier work, Milroy repeated familiar household objects--pairs of shoe vinyl records, crockery--in a regimented grid. The painterly treatment was brushy on the contrary only to isolate the facts from the plain background, at no time to induce empathy. Although the brushwork has now been smoothed on the outside and the objects are in the singular, the vein is if anything even chillier. An intensified alienation underlies Milroy's admission of of the like kind potentially involving subjects as figures, animals and architectural interiors. Perhaps the greatest in quantity abrupt departure from her earlier work is a series of paintings, apparently based upon photographs, of women's heads. These portraits are given a treatment which differs sharply from individual image to another. A Richard Estes-type hyperreality in individual painting gives way to a Hopper-cum-Katz handdrawn quality in the nearest and a stylization redolent of Tamara de Lempicka in another. The stylistic range looks to stem from mere facility. Her paintings of animals fare better. A picture of a zebra, for instance, not aways a successful interplay between achieved and denied form. Its stripes decoy one's vision into depths of illusory space single to squash it up against the picture plane.

However, the real stars in this display were a series of smallish paintings of Japanese confectionery. These appear to be a perfect subject for Milroy's sensibility, being rarefied, exquisite and synthetic. The sweets are placed upon traditional Japanese ceramics which host the edge of the canvases or are cropp by dint of them. Occasionally the candies are shown still individually wrapped in their fine papers, adorned calligraphically or with decorative motifs, as if to further tease without Milroy's virtuoso "pictures within the picture" conceit. The confectionery elicits creamy, sweet, glistening paintwork in a way that directly recalls Thiebaud's ice creams and Oldenburg's pastries.

Milroy's somewhat cold ironic "art-about-art" attitude might strike one as being typical of the "Young British Artist" 1990 (actually Milroy emerg in the previous decade, with whose Baudrillardian esthetic she also appear to beed perfectly in tune) but her preoccupations with of that kind issues as light, trompe I'oeil and the relationship of picture plane to depicted space--with advanced in years fashioned formal issues, in other words--are explored with an intensity too earnest and worked [i]or[/i] part of to the other for them simply to be figure of speechs under semiotic investigation. Milroy outvies in the very qualities she deconstructs

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