Justine Fisher
In Portrait of Rafaella, the artist's niece appears twice. The double image has the quality of a time-lapse photograph: read left to right, Rafaella appears younger in the first panel. Only her clothes and soft toy point to this being the same event. Rafaella is captured in motion, her movements in the two frames occurring seconds apart. Childhood is momentary; the growth of children rapid and exacting. For an observer, these changes can appear dramatic – the child a different child day-to-day, even moment-to-moment.
b.1984, Cape Town
“The painting never seems right,” Justine Fisher says of her large-scale works, “even when a part of the picture is looking the way I want it to look, something else needs fixing... My patience is challenged by the imperfection that my work is revealing.” Resisting staid finality, Fisher pursues instead a momentary balance in oil and gesture. Her large-scale paintings more often take as subject dimly lit landscapes and interior scenes transcribed with a loosely figurative style that leans towards abstraction. Where Fisher once worked directly from photographs taken and found, her more recent compositions are described first in sketches and then collaged with photographic fragments, later finding expression on canvas. This process of re-articulation across mediums lends her works their surreal, dreamlike undertones, being neither wholly imagined nor copied from life.
Daughter of cultural benefactor and artist Wendy Fisher, it is perhaps unsurprising that Fisher became a painter. Hers was an upbringing surrounded by art and its attendant propositions. Fisher’s paintings, with their distinct gestural language, find easy company hung alongside the works of artists she might count among her childhood influences.