Joanna van Son

Joanna van Son is a fine artist based in London. Van Son was born in Oman to Venezuelan/Irish and Dutch parents, and grew up in China, Russia, and the UK. Having sustained a lifelong passion for the arts, van Son commenced her current artistic practice while studying at the Bartlett school of Architecture. Exploring the female figure inside and out – her earliest studies were critically ambivalent self-portraits – her paintings and drawings distort the familiar spatial qualities of the human body, paying particular attention to the material and symbolic textures and sensitivities of the skin.

From a young age, van Son was attracted to the intensity of bodily representations in Baroque art, taking particular interest in paintings by the master Caravaggio and the dynamism he brought forth through candlelight. Recognising the dynamic quality of figurations in Caravaggio’s as well as the contemporary artist Cecily Brown’s paintings, van Son developed a vital appreciation for process and the workplace- studio in her work.

She paints on thin unprimed cotton canvases nailed to the plaster walls of her studio. Once complete, each canvas is ripped off the wall and stretched onto a wooden frame. This unique and violent practice of detaching work from workplace exposes the strokes and steps made, taking fragments from the studio wall while also leaving a positive im- print, a trace, on the wall, which becomes the site of an extraordinary palimpsest.

Ultimately, her fascination is with the playfully violent grey zones of reality-making that are made visible by the practices of art and architecture as explored through the intellectual labours that flesh out the bodily estimations of light and space. Van Son draws upon her engagement with both disciplines to paint the intangible ‘forces’ that lie be- neath meaning and affect and give them their structure, revealing the often- occluded processes that constitute human experience.