Natalia González Martín’s focus is on the female figure and, spanning millennia and many cultures, how womanhood has been rendered, in various degrees of poesy. Think on the myths of Eve, the Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene - signifiers of femininity in all their power and grace - which González Martín references in her achingly beautiful work: paintings that exhale a certain ideogrammatic, egg-tempera-ed ‘Renaissanceness’ that makes them feel truly and exquisitely trapped in time, oblivious to the chaos of the now.

Exploring both the stature and struggle of the feminine, González Martín depicts her subjects with a poise and precision of pose and predicament chiming perfectly with the artist’s flawless, almost brushless application.

Understanding or, better still, interrogating the dynamic of femininity via González Martín’s painting puts paid to any such reading of her subject. Her opalescent surfaces, conjured by the most delicate painterly touch, caresses the figure into gentle life, with a beauty that slips through the annals of time.