“RFA has established an enviable reputation as a leading platform for the discovery, support and development of international emerging and established artists primarily engaged in themes of minimal abstraction.
In a noisy digital age of instant images and disposable fashions, the works emerging from the studios of the captivating group of painters that RFA represents quietly ask us to slow down and take a step back in order to look forward. Through their enduring commitment to critical investigation and material experimentation the artists have the ability to radically refocus our engagement with the rapidly changing contemporary world. Often employing a delicate combination of reduction and repetition the works remove the pictorial and explore what is left, playfully open up new spaces for reflection and inviting us to stop and think. For this issue of Emergent, Emma has brought together a small focused group of such artists each of whom are carving out distinct visual languages which self-consciously and playfully reference the weighty history of painting whilst continuously interrogating new spaces of inquiry emerging on its periphery. From the quivering compositional grids of septuagenarian Spanish painter Joaquim Chancho to the automatist gestures of young Scottish painter Struan Teague, at the core of the collection is a conflicting impulse between accumulation and erasure, a delicate balance between intuitive gesture and deeply considered subject.
Everything is abstracted from something. Many galleries programs and artist rosters are borne out of the sensibilities of the curators who initiate them and this is certainly the case with RFA. Emma comes from a family of academics and archaeologists and these initial influences can be found at the core of RFA’s critical agenda today. Hot summer afternoons spent with her father touring 7th Century monasteries in Northern Spain gave an early appreciation for not only tradition and lived ritual but also perhaps more critically an intrinsic understanding of essential architectural qualities such as the use of light, space and sound. A childhood home filled with culturally and historically diverse material objects ranging from ancient Egyptian Ushabti to Paleolithic spearheads and Chinese manuscripts initiated a lifelong fascination with the layered cultural journeys of objects and their unsettled relation to each other. Later on, Emma graduated as a student of Art History and Improvisational Jazz and this rare and fascinating convergence of academic research and creative experimentation has also provided a rich ground on which the foundations of RFA have been built.
Emma has an uncanny ability to think laterally across genre, medium and market forces to discover often overlooked minimal artists working with a maturity and clarity of vision rarely found in those other than masters from the art-historical past. It is for this reason collectors, curators and creatives continue return to the gallery as a source for inspiration. For me, RFA can attribute much of its success to Emma’s essential understanding that the contemplative pauses and quiet spaces between marks can make as authoritative a statement as the painterly gestures in themselves. “
Alexander Caspari, Encounter Contemporary in emergent magazine, 2020. Issue 5
