[...] The world is currently facing many challenges, and a number of us may find ourselves reflecting on certain matters. Throughout those periods the arts can become a tool to help alleviate emotions, highlight causes and struggles, act as a sanctuary or reflect ideas. Collapsing Space, an exhibition at Addis Fine Art London, displays a series of paintings by Selome Muleta exploring womenhood in states of inner reflections and the relationship between portraiture and still life.
Muleta unifies those two genres within her paintings, showcasing them as one, that an environment forms part of a person's being. Acting as agents of that unity, are the artist's use of colour and pattern, where a figure's inner reflections feel as though they are lifted up onto the surface, merging together with the still life. Blurred faces, cut offs, a focus on a particular part of the body, alongside energetic brushstroke movements, add to that, but also somehow to stillness, as a dialogue unravels itself between the viewer reflecting back at a portrait's own inner reflections. Those faces becoming any one person, a mirror onto sentiments. [...]
