Lauren Brown’s enigmatic paintings ooze and pulsate in a mass of deep and visceral colour. In Brown’s unsettled pictorial universe, one soon understands that knowledge and certainty are subsumed by inquiry and experimentation with this thrust nurturing a surface as gooey and inchoate as it is angry and alive. Forms twist, as both shapes and cyphers encourage a collision then dissipation of shape and chroma. The surface never starts or ends but rather sits on the edge of some primordial coalescence, shedding its dark light on our tested experience. Hers are compositions that morph and diffuse, grow and accumulate as if by a painterly tropism.

Evolving from a range of art historical influences, she paints lavish amphitheatres of Gothic terror, employing bold, bruising brushwork to propel a palette of putrefaction as germinal as it is nullifying. The viewer is left peering into the enigma of either the abyss or themselves, asking of Brown’s shapes and movements, marks and colours what is and what is not real, imagined, organic, familiar or even significant. Any test of understanding is thus not posed by the viewer, but by Brown’s paintings and the fantasia of horror they so beautifully, cruelly unveil.