‘A Closer Look’

Bianca MacCall

12th of April till the 6th of May 2023

Soho Revue is pleased to present, ‘A Closer Look’, a solo exhibition of paintings by Bianca MacCall. 

In this new suite of paintings, ’A Closer Look’ documents the humorous and often surreal elements of daily life, namely the trappings of a nine-to-five job. Her paintings can be read as a narrative, beginning and ending with the commute to and from work. 

Bianca’s works are not painted ‘from life’ and nor are they precise translations of photographs. She often collages photographs together, manipulating light and artificially amplifying luminosity and clarity, foregrounding otherwise overlooked or unseen details of urban life. The resulting works are like collages as she merges layers and viewpoints, accumulating details and creating dense visual structures whilst also conveying a transient sense of ephemerality as she records the changing landscapes of a journey to work.  Bianca pays close attention to near-microscopic detail in order to achieve the representational verisimilitude of her final works: her final paintings have a degree of photographic actuation as she grapples with the technical challenge of focusing on fabric, glass, reflections and the effects of light. 

The resulting collection of work is a contemplative meditation on life in the city, which is also heavily inspired by ‘mumblecore’ films, mainly their naturalistic acting and documentation of the lives of young characters who float aimlessly in the urban jungles of modernity. However, unlike the photorealist tradition that precedes Bianca, in which a desire for emotional neutrality presided, Bianca’s paintings have a greater sense of character, both in their humour and whimsicality, in which nature is just out of reach, viewed from the interior of an office or train carriage.