Emma Puntis at Supplement

Supplement - a new space to me - is situated just off Hackney Road and has a programme of six solos exhibitions a year.  Last night I dropped by to see Wednesday's Child, a solo show byEmma Puntis. Emma showed a work in The Painting Room at Transition and kindly let me use an image of one of her paintings to accompany a short piece of text about The English Rose in the Beauty issue of Garageland. She was also in Jerwood Contemporary Painters 2009. This show contains a selection of varied new works including collages and works on paper. The work is in line with a growing trend in painting to use the minimal effort to create fluid works that sit somewhere between representation and abstraction. The stand out pieces for me were a painting of a teddy bear like face on what looked like a page torn from a magazine (complete with curled up corner) and a small minimally rendered water colour of a hand surrounded by empty space on a sheet of paper which was masking taped on to a sheet of grainy wood. 

Emma's work is generally focused on faces and the nicely written press release states that 'In our perception of the world the face exists as a unique and privileged site of visual coding, a singular site of communicative power in which the nuances and complexities of expression take on a vast significance. Puntis' paintings play on this significance in the way that recognisable features, such as the eyes, lips and nose remain identifiable yet contain a certain painterly ambiguity that leads them towards abstraction.'