ANNETTE BEZOR

Good looking women — “lookers” — who are looking at us, looking at each other.

Bezor takes images of women from classical painting, contemporary decorative art and porn magazines and recreates them as stylised icons to reveal and subvert the power and impact of the originals. In making us meet the newly focused gaze of these women, Bezor exposes the true nature of society’s attitudes to women. She then situates these iconic figures in a chaotic psychological space to expose the roles, identities and emotional states of women generally.

Her 'Entanglement' series of paintings are typically composites of several images located in a violated, contrasting ground. The resulting construct becomes a metaphor for the construction of identity. 'Entanglement Complicity', for example, clashes images of a Madonna and Child with Japanese Geisha and the classical art nude – three archetypal roles traditionally assigned to women.

In 'Lookers', the ravaged underpainting shows through the surface, so that the pretty faces appear damaged, alluding to the superficial nature of beauty, and to aging, destruction and death.

Her strategy in the 'Face Value' series is to caricature friends, models or images from popular culture – the “Asian” figures now have blue eyes and red hair – and overlay them with translucent bands of colour to mask their characters and turn their portraits into abstract paintings.

In 'The Silent Violence', one of a series entitled 'Silent Violent', she exaggerates the superficial prettiness of the Geisha by stylising the figures and posing them with flowers and goldfish. The women appear in close contact but their intimacy is circumscribed by the manners of their culture. Their gaze is inward and they are disconnected – emblematic and untouchable. Ultimately, they must be silent, though their mask-like expressions
betray suppressed emotion.

The concept of beauty evident in 'The Silent Violence' has parallels in all societies. Bezor says her work is, “representative of a psychological and emotional space that people inhabit but are silent about. We all have this – a passive exterior, inside which is a Pandora’s box.” We are taught to behave according to the rules of our society, submerging our deepest feelings beneath a civilised façade, even to the extent that we are unable to recognise our own turbulent inner states, the violence that we do to others and the violence that is done to us.

Annette Bezor has developed a unique and powerful visual language to comment on contemporary culture and society. Her appropriated and reworked figures stare out at us, challenging the security of our preconceptions and asking us to look more deeply.

- Chris Reid in conversation with the artist, June 2011