'Living in the Imagination of Others'

Julian Bell author: ‘What is Painting’ and ‘Mirror on the World’ a new History of Art’

Marguerite Horner performs a simple, ancient but profound trick with her paintings. She takes a sheet of primed canvas or paper and makes it glow as if lit from within. Physically, the white is no more white than it was before she touched it, but spiritually it is transformed. The markings Horner makes serve not so much to represent views of the world around us, as to activate what lies behind them a quality not to be named, only touched on. A walk in the open with a camera has presented her with an epiphany, some angle of approach on whatever is real.

Often a cunning interplay of divergent pigments only reveals itself in a doubletake. There is an equal cunning to her compositional strategies - the daring imbalances of above and below, the barriers she throws across the act of vision. Those barriers - ripples, branches, clouds - become flowing calligraphic performances. This is committed oil painting, and full of the medium's pleasures.

Magnolia Madness