The artist’s eye

It seems the public want the picturesque, and quaint, romantic ruins.

Tessa Alexander wants us to take a closer look at those living on the fringes of society, the desperately poor who are barely scraping a living. Picturesque as their dwellings maybe, most have no running water; a piece of foam is their only bedding. We like to hang paintings of these pitiful shelters on our walls, but none who could afford better accommodation would willing live in one.

Given sufficient funds, they would, of course, hang pictures of the poverty-stricken on their walls. In fact “Handle with Care” was sold before the exhibition opened. There is, indeed, beauty in this painting but when we look closer there is pathos in — is it a child squatting outside this board hut? “Foreshore” is another lovely, lyrical piece spoiled, for both photographers and viewers by the glass reflecting spotlights and fluorescent lights. Anyone who buys that painting has to hang it facing a completely blank, white or cream wall, because (as is the case with all the other paintings framed with glass in this exhibition) the glass will reflect the doors, windows, tables, chairs, other paintings and nick-knacks on the other side of the room. The only solution to this problem is for the buyer to reach further down into his/her pocket and have the painting framed in non-reflective glass.

There is no doubt of the social statement made in “Welcome to POS;” the vagrant standing in what was intended to be an impressive entrance tells the tragic story of the hopeless and the abandoned. It is stark, arresting and — in its own way, a thing of beauty.

Simplicity is the keynote in “Market Vendor (home grown).” The vendor sits behind the table, her scales ready to weigh the produce she has grown in her own garden. Seeing this, one thinks of the dispossessed of Chatham and Union who grow (grew?) food in their own gardens for their own table and for sale at makeshift wayside stalls to earn a little cash to buy other necessities of life.

“Parlour” is typical of many pieces one sees in exhibitions up and down the Caribbean chain. The windswept coconut palm, rusting galvanise roof, even the white plastic chair outside speak of desperation, even as they enchant the artist’s eye.

On the other hand, “Fragment” is an enigma; the dark colours, long Rasta locks, the man leaning elbow on thighs are but dimly perceived in what appears, at first sight, to be an abstract of light and shade.

This is but one (and probably the most lucid) of ten similar “Fragments” — all ten are portraits of those living on the edge. “Rethinking the Landscape,” an exhibition of paintings by Tessa Alexander, continues at Horizons Art Gallery until April 1.