Artist of our current exhibition “Welcome to a Land of Needs and Desires”
The pictorial medium is the main research tool of Hazel Ann Watling (1984, Great Britain), who is fiercely committed to evoking rather than interpreting. While her smartphone is one of her favourite instruments, which enables her to capture any image or composition that engages her interest on the spot, the artist produces her paintings over a long period of time, in contrast to the instantaneous appearance of the image on a screen.
Through this medium she approaches her digital inventory of everyday life, experimenting with the reaction of mixtures, the combination of colours skilfully measured out, the speed at which the pigments propagate and then dry, occasionally letting natural elements play an essential role in the alteration of her paintings (through the rain, the sun…). Influenced by abstract expressionism or the disciplines of Color Field painting in her relationship to colour, Hazel Ann Watling also pays particular attention to the surface and the props of her works, which form explosive wall installations that play here with the chromatic palette of La Vague.
Mischievously entitled “D’PAK & OPRAH”, this new series was produced in response to Deepak Chopra’s YouTube lectures on the notion of desire, crudely mashed up and served up to the audience in an playful and entertaining manner. Through the artifices of painting which she approaches like a transitional state, Hazel Ann Watling seeks to arouse wonder, to trigger a mental or spiritual journey through images, connect the colour fields and the abstract lines to forces beyond us that could grant us access to a meditative and critical phase.
