Description

Charlotte’s work is inspired by interiors, travels, and architectural composition, in seamless communion with elements from the natural world. Trees push through flat concrete, while perspectives unfold in sheets of glass. These images of modernist leisure leave one with the feeling of having entered a space only recently vacated, dramatising stillness without surrendering movement. These are environments that suggest, technically as well as artistically, indistinct human activity and motion.

“The interiors that I paint are entirely imagined – I am very interested in architecture; a certain angle or spatial construction within a room. I do not necessarily have a constructed interior in my head, I start with one element that has inspired me and let the painting unfold.

There is a sense of anticipation yet stillness, almost like a moment frozen in time, remembering the split second of a place or object. It is this fragility and vulnerability I want to convey, almost waiting for something to happen or even emerge.”

If, as Kevin Lynch argues in his essay The Image of the City (1960), architecture is ‘construction in space’ and therefore a ‘temporal art’, then Keates’s paintings, replete with geometric and trapezoidal imagery, are the artist fracticalising the no-less concrete practice of the architect. Keates’s work is interdisciplinary, meta-textual – serene, airy landscapes that shock the viewer with ‘more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear’, evermore settings, corners and aspects ‘waiting to be explored’.