Tower and Town, November 2021

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Arts Review

The White Horse Gallery has re-opened, and this month’s exhibition is Room, paintings and drawings by local artist, Victoria Jinivizian NEAC.

In 2017, Victoria’s debut exhibition at The White Horse Gallery Interior Lives was an exploration of space and interior living, a theme which has dominated much of her artworks since Victoria began drawing and painting on Foundation, and then at The Slade thirty years ago.

The concept of interior spaces is explored through a combination of paintings, drawings and sketches, all of which interrogate this notion of living, and the immediacy of space and objects that surround us in our daily lives.

Room is a beautiful collection of artworks. They are still, quiet, warm and undisturbed. These emotions are captured by the use of colour and definitive lines marked on the paper. Studying the artworks, you feel as though you are standing in the rooms themselves, or that somehow you are able to transport yourself into these dwellings, whether it be a beautiful drawing room, or indeed a messy teenage bedroom. (I’m presuming it’s a boy’s bedroom…)

Sometimes, a painting of a room can leave you feeling detached, unwelcome and unresponsive. Victoria’s depiction of rooms however have quite the opposite effect. They are enchanting – some epitomise the feeling of looking out of a dewy window on an early summer’s morning, whilst others stimulate the feeling of a velvety, vamp bedroom oozing sensuality.

It’s amazing how comforted a painting or a drawing of a room can make you feel – even though we might never have seen or been in these rooms before, sometimes the expression and technique of a drawing or a painting can spur your senses to tingle and twitch.

They are literally windows into other people’s lives, and with that, display a whole variety of atmospheres, colours and surprises.

Room was at The White Horse Gallery between 8th October – 31st October 2021.

Gabriella Venus