Mia Vallance

“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either”

—T.S Elliot, Wasteland

Mia Vallance’s Painting for a Short Future presents a perturbed body of work. Frenetic brushstrokes amongst swathes of colour have come to be her signature, but what is debuting here is an overwhelming sense of decay and uncertainty. The paintings in the show echo T.S Elliot’s oneiric yet corporeal poem Wasteland. Having referenced the line ‘breeding lilacs out of the dead earth,’ Mia’s paintings suggest heavy heads on thin stems, seeping colours marred by overwhelming browns and dark places. There’s a timelessness to the phenomenon of decay, yet she also acknowledges the specificity of the disconcerting times she paints in.

There is a sense of an increased scale in her new paintings- grand and simultaneously microscopic. The gestures seem sky bound, monumental in their reach and unsure in their opacity. The washes of colour are hasty to be too loud, instead concerned with the ‘glow’- as if there is something else at hand. The nature of a colour placed beneath another gives the paintings literal depth and allows for a magnetism to the work which both pushes and pulls. Mia enjoys playing with this luminescence, we can imagine the static images moving as the pigments spill.

The placelessness of her paintings heightens the feeling of an unnerving. A glowing from elsewhere comes to function as something impending- awaiting something sinister in this short proceeding future. Mia imagines paintings in an entropic environment. Do the works depict the cloud hanging over them or the fight against? Having the two works Breath and Untitled/ Suffocate in the show toy with this dichotomy. Before they have fully formed in front of us the images are already slipping away in fading hues and amorphous forms. Chemistry and an emphasis on pigments and solvents are important to her process in order to get the desired effect of ‘dissolving, emerging, erasure.’ These words ring true to the lack of grip one has on an image of the future which is equally being destroyed as it unfolds.

Comparing the x-shape butterfly wing motif which appears in several of the paintings in this show but perhaps most evidently in Raw Umber to a Scalextric set is perhaps exactly the kind of city- pace these paintings are trying to avoid. Though undoubtedly Mia’s London-based practice means the inner city is indeed the perspective they’ve been painted from. While the works do indeed glimmer and bleed in direction of the decelerative, they acknowledge the disquiet from which they have been born.

—Esme Blair

Photo credit: Aurelien Mole