Lennox St. Gallery is pleased to present The Curious Nature of Aether, an exhibition of recent paintings by Louise Feneley.  

In her second exhibition with our gallery, the artist continues the exploration of the themes touched upon in the previous exhibition. The symbiotic relationship between humans and nature remains central to Louise’s oeuvre. Not too dissimilarly to the grand tradition of the nineteenth-century Romanticists, she portrays the powerful immensity and timelessness of nature versus the corresponding fragility and transience of human experience.

Her depiction of rolling waves in paintings such as Legend of the Great Wave and Call of the Sea is monumental and vertiginous. The viewer is positioned in the extreme foreground, arrested by the beauty of vision and the play of turquoise and aquamarine tints, blinded by the whiteness of foaming crests, submitting to the ultimate peril for the momentous experience of synaesthetic beauty.

The unstoppable forces of nature are apparent in Louise’s still-life paintings. They meditate upon nature’s duality as giver and destroyer: the bounty and detritus alternate in a continuous journey of artistic explorations. Songs of the Dancing Garden and Song to the Winds and the Moon capture the elements in a centrifugal swirl of wind and water, a promise of calm is offered by rainbow edged-nimbuses.

In panels from the Weather Project suite, detailed studies of light and atmosphere and the interplay of reflections between the ocean and the sky, coalesced into the shape of the pearl, that inchoate object of human existence. Steeped in legends since times immemorial, born of the sea, carried aloft by the goddess of love, the pearls have been emblematic of femininity, fecundity, and the mysteries of birth: in the Medieval and Renaissance eras, no bridal portrait was complete without a piece of jewellery set with a trinity of pearls.

A distinguishing feature of Louise’s paintings is their fine execution: in many of the works, the smoothness of surface belies the evidence of human touch. Atmospheric effects are minutely observed and carefully captured. The challenge of conveying translucency with opaque materials on a two-dimensional canvas can be observed in intricate details in the paintings of waves as well as glass objects.

Louise Feneley, painter of portraits, landscapes, and still lifes, has been exhibiting regularly inAdelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney. Her works have been included in important curated and survey exhibitions of contemporary Australian art, including at the SASA Gallery in Adelaide, Gippsland Art Gallery in Sale (Vic), and the Parliament House in Canberra. Louise’s works had been selected as finalists in numerous art prizes, and on many occasions she had walked away with the highly coveted ‘People’s Choice Award.’ Louise’s works are to be found in the Parliament House in Canberra, as well as in selected regional, tertiary, and corporate collections in Australia and abroad.