A Canadian painter based in London, Lisa Milroy uses almost obsessive precision and great technical refinement to depict unexpectedly simple subjects from the everyday world: shoes, fans, tyres, stamps or, in the case of Lace, trimmings, the decorative touches applied to curtains, chairs and clothing. She paints them with a level of detail and absolute verisimilitude that borders on, if not hyperrealism (and the visual technique of drawing for advertising), at least an apparently absolute realism: these trimmings look exactly as if they had been displayed in the window of a haberdasher’s.

 

Milroy’s work fits within the 1980’s tendency that became known as the “return to painting” precisely because, after years of experimental tendencies and works constructed with ephemeral materials (during the 1970s), there was a return to the more traditional mediums of painting and sculpture.

 

In fact, Lisa Milroy works with the great techniques of all classical painting – perspective, light, volume and composition – and has chosen the still life, one of its historically most favoured genres. Yet, on a scale and with a sense of seriality and repetition that are absolutely contemporary and only made possible by abstraction, minimalism and pop art. In this large work, the rigorous perspective and the achievement of visual form through shading make the canvas so realistic that it appears to be composed of a number of trompe l’oeils.

 

Yet Milroy states «What I am interested in is not the realism of objects but the realism of the idea of objects»*. In other words, the artist attempts not to represent each apparently banal object but to offer a representation of it, providing it with a stage and showing it, so that we can look at the object in a new light.

 

 

Isabel Carlos

May 2010

 

* «Figuração e Repetição» in Expresso, 23 November 1991.