Wholesale Gemma Smith

Eleven Colour is both subject and content in Gemma Smith’s luminous paintings, which revel in the interaction of intense pigments. Nuanced arrangements of calibrated primaries pull and push the picture plane. Smith’s palette has reached to the extremes of the chromatic scale in works such as Eleven, which are loaded with titanium white, exacting their colour play at the palest end of the spectrum. She talks of making a painting where the colours are still active but almost indiscernible, emulating the phenomena of retinal burn after looking at one of her more high-key compositions. Reproduced as a jigsaw puzzle the act of recomposing the image challenges and confirms our ability to recognise colour even at the very threshold of perception.