A Concrete Blush: Eric Henshall
29 jan – 14 feb 2021
A warm palette and black-lined architectural geometry create an inviting visual world. This series of portraits, urban vignettes and neon still lifes combines careful observation and whimsical expression to draw the viewer into the artist’s world - a world that is as familiar as it is enticing.
Eric Henshall is a storyteller. He tells his stories in paint. These stories could be the explicit narrative presented by various characters in a tableau; or the soft suggestion offered in the steady gaze of a portrait; or even the unknowable stories that accumulate on the surfaces of the curious objects he assembles in a still life. He sees stories everywhere.
Even as he is driven to express stories, he is also passionate about colour and architectural forms. His palette is thick with a range of warm reds and yellows punctuated by flashes of neon glare. Within these colours, the rigid geometry of black-lined architecture provides a solid under-carriage. Even his portraits have a hint of angular construction to them.
His work is a combination of careful observation and whimsical caricature. In this way he does not duplicate the world we share but adds a new layer to it, a secondary world, his own world – which he shares with the audience, offering us something that is at once instantly recognizable and curiously unknown.
Image: Red City, acrylic on canvas, 60x90cm