by Jeni Williams, Planet 165

It was very quiet in Aberystwyth Arts Centre on Easter Saturday and, apart from the attendant, the exhibition space there was empty. I had gone to see The Black Cot, the exhibition of Shani Rhys James’s latest work, and in the silence of the deserted gallery the sheer scale, colour and unspoken drama of the pictures resonated with an extraordinary intensity. The abrupt, evocative title points to Rhys James’s ongoing fascination with the dark cradle of the family. The word cot may suggest the nursery but Rhys James’s nursery is not the comfortable, padded refuge, filled with soft toys and soft furnishings, that is idealised at every level in our alienated culture. Her black metal cots look like cages, like hospital cots, or the bare minimum provided for refugees, their impermanence emphasised by small wheels. These harsh interiors are populated by alien-faced children, as solid and as driven as the masculine space of the public world against which the security of the home has traditionally been defined. Rhys James takes the matter of the family romance with a seriousness as great as that of Freud and, like him, sees it as a place of secrets. Her bedrooms are haunted by watchful occupants, their flesh raw with the repressed emotions that leak out in thick scorch marks of red paint.

                 Black Cot II from the exhibition The Cradle of Flesh.

The fact that each of these flayed subjects, even the children, has the look of Rhys James herself gives the picture a surreal intensity, as if the self is falling into pieces. The impression is reinforced by the inclusion in the new show of five self-portrait heads of the kind she produced for her 1997 Oriel Mostyn exhibition, Facing the Self. These small images, 25 x 20 cms, are both intensely individual in their style (the marvellous mobility of the paint) and generic in that they replicate the sense of unease and chaotic uncertainty that lies inescapably within us all. Rhys James’s underworld nursery is perhaps, after all, as familiar as the sweeter, sunlit version we more readily take for reality.

                  Bed and Wallpaper, 210 x 210 cms, oil on canvas.

Questions about the nature of reality and the associated issue of its representation haunt contemporary painting. The genius of European painters has long rested on their ability to construct illusions of a material reality; they painted ideal landscapes as if real, skilfully mimicked the effects of velvet, silk, lace, skin, hair; of bone, of water, of fire. But in the wake of the invention of photography, such imitation may appear outmoded. Many modern artists engage overtly with the camera and its domination of material representation: the photographic self-portraits of Cindy Sherman, for example, caught momentarily in “stills”, explore the malleability of the self in society, while Jeff Koons employs advertising clichés to dramatise the commodification of desire in his recent garish images of floating doughnuts and melting chocolate bars. We live in a “post media” age in which painting itself is only one option amongst many and painting devoted to the figure in particular is increasingly replaced by abstract and conceptual work. And yet the figurative work of Rhys James, like that of Bacon or Freud or, to mention another female artist, Kahlo, continues to fascinate and disturb its viewers. Each explores the problematic nature of representation itself, and their shared modern subject — the dissolving, mutating self of both artist and viewer — is the very opposite of the Enlightenment self and the dream of realism it generated.