This is the fourth iteration of rightNOW, an exhibition format that expedites freshly conceived ideas and experiments straight from artists’ studios to eager new audiences at Onespace gallery. An immediate sense of contemporaneity is established by the premise that the featured works have been produced ‘right now’, and indeed, these paintings by Caroline Gasteen, Alisha Kitto, Clare Jaque Vasquez, and Arabella Walker are ‘hot off the press’. But this is only one part of their appeal. Between and among them, these paintings toy with tensions between the surface and the illusion of space and depth; innovate against traditional methods of paint application; and level a collective challenge at Isabelle Graw’s assertion that “painting has long since departed from its ancestral home—that is, the picture on canvas”.1 Moreover, the works speak subtly to discourse around contemporary painting via their sensitive, almost inward-facing orientation to the world.
