Curation

Dancing to a Mirror

Fitzrovia Gallery, 139 Whitfield St, London W1T 5EN, 16th-22nd September 2024

PVs 16th September 6-9pm & 19th September 4-8pm 

Open Tues, Wed, Fri and Saturday 12-6; Thurs 12-8

All welcome

Lucy Cade (b.1980, London) is a painter with a lifelong interest in film and drama. Method Acting has been a particular fascination for her in recent years which is evident in her show at Fitzrovia. The techniques, developed by Russian theatre director Konstantin Stanislavski, aim for convincing acting through identifying with a character’s inner motivation and emotions. Lucy embraced the phenomenon both as subject-matter - capturing despair, deviousness and thrill - and as a formula for painting: executing the portrait, she actively moves in front of the canvas; dancing almost; internalising the experience of her subject. As such, the title of the exhibition, Dancing to a Mirror, is the artist’s personal, and inevitably intense, experience of painting. 

In exploring method acting, driven by empathy, Lucy devoted her attention to the female actor as a subject. Empathy, in her own words, ‘promotes a particular kind of prescience and involvement in the act of painting. The painting is not a separate entity but something I become a part of, intellectually and emotionally, in the process of creating’. 

However, Lucy is not a gestural painter. She builds her compositions with meticulous care, demonstrating patience and an understanding of both colour relationships and the application of paint using brushes of a variety of sizes. The application is swift at times, but never hurried. In this, one can detect influences of the French and Italian 18th and 19th century masters, which is not surprising, remembering the despair and suffering of Géricault’s battlefield scenes.  

The recurring oval shapes evoke mirror-like self-reflection and self-absorption but also a state of being in which one’s existence is the only certainty and the performance of it the only reality. The viewer is encouraged to observe, in the manner of fin-de-siecle poet Arthur Symons’ 1895 work ‘La Mélinite’ about the famous cabaret dancer Jane Avril:

'....Alone, apart, one dancer watches

Her mirrored, morbid grace;

Before the mirror, face to face,

Alone she watches

Her morbid, vague, ambiguous grace’.