BETWEEN THE LINES

A profound chronicler of the intimacies of the female experience, artist Chantal Joffe explores the elemental truth of family dynamics for a new show

- HANNAH SILVER

Chantal Joffe deals in memory.

In the thick, tangible brushstrokes of her paintings and in the generous sizes of her canvases, we are invited to discover her women – because it is often women that she paints, those she admires, or those she is close to.

Joffe has a unique figurative style, eschewing a neat formality for gorgeously expressive brushwork, with the palpability of the paint allowing for a greater freedom in the depictions of the women that she is painting. Her complex, multifaceted subjects can only come alive in her thickly-drawn sweeps of paint, their nuances, quirks and features recognisably theirs, without being perfectly or realistically rendered.

Throughout her career, Joffe has puzzled away at the cyclical nature of family, considering her role as a mother, daughter and sister in a series of emotionally charged paintings that unpick occasionally frazzled, poignant or sensitive dynamics. In Joffe’s paintings, moments in time are captured, frozen and combed over for clues. Work is autobiographical - through it, we have watched her daughter Esme grow from child to adult, and followed Joffe through sickness and health in a series of unflinching self-portraits.