Victoria Achache

Tolstoy’s parable of ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, title also of a great essay by Isaiah Berlin, juxtaposes the hedgehog, who knows and executes one big idea, with the fox, possessor of multiple ingenuities and skills. Victoria Achache is a fox determined to be a hedgehog. She is an adept draughtsman and printmaker. But she has devoted more than twenty years to an attempt to realise the human figure in an ambiguous interior or exterior setting. And to do so in oil paint by the limited means of juxtaposed blocks of colour. Oil paint has a unique capacity to give depth and texture to the idea of colour itself and thereby, in magical metamorphosis, to our emotional response to colour in the world before us. If you look at a room, or a person, or a landscape and then close your eyes in order to recreate it mentally, you will find that the visual and mental images are different. In the same way, the raw material of oil paint, its stickiness and intractability, is different also from the airy nothingness of space. As colour photography reveals to us, colour itself is as different in two dimensions (on the page), as in three (in space), or even four (in the mind). Achache has laboured at this physical and metaphysical problem for years. She has been criticised for seeming to repeat the same sort of painting. I believe she has done nothing of the sort. She is more like a physicist working on an equation that seeks to conform to or illustrate an observed or suspected phenomenon. Her last show, at The Gallery at Green and Stone in Chelsea, from which our reproductions were taken, was, for me (who has followed her work for many years) the Eureka show. The tensions between something seen, something invented, something remembered and something that needs to be changed from one state to another, have been resolved. The hedgehog has coiled itself into an armed ball and is for the moment invulnerable. A modern master, Morandi, worked in the same way. He spent nearly fifty years painting empty bottles. But he did crack the physics and metaphysics of the bottle. A human figure in an interior is as old as painting itself. Victoria Achache has now uncovered an old truth in new colours. We, the viewers, find that our perception of reality has altered. These are important paintings.