Don't look to these plush confectionary portraits by Stella Vine in her solo show, entitled Petal (part two), for any useful information about her subjects, as it's not there. The most dynamic elements of her compositions are the expansive, amorphous color fields built of countless layers of underpainting and the volcanic eruptions of impasto that interrupt them. The English painter creates her paintings with just the bare minimum required to give the works something like space extending from the picture plane, forestalling vertigo. The sensationalism of the images' content sometimes obscures the real joy in the work, but with a list of subjects that careens from Jean Harlowe, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Frida Kahlo, Sid and Nancy, and Princess Diana to the artist's relatives, it's hard not to look for meaning.

In 'Jean tiger skin', Jean Harlowe lounges on top of an orange tiger skin rug across a sea of electric blue paint, her face a carnival mask with sharp teeth, blood-red lips and clumpy mascara guarding her startled blue eyes like barbed wire. These and other grotesqueries find their mirror in the tiger's blue glass orbs, exaggeratedly arched eyebrows and hastily rendered fur. The painting has nothing at all to do with Jean Harlowe and everything to do with Vine's apparent aversion to either mixing colors on the palette, or leaving any paint in the tube. Her affection for celebrities, combined with the brazenly unacademic ambitions of her figurative style, triggers comparison to her contemporary Elizabeth Peyton. Vine is far less sophisticated, but that is precisely the point. The artlessness Peyton strives for as a conceptual frame work, Vine achieves without even trying, and her emerging voice does not seek to overcome her outsider status. Rather, her research is really appealing due to the awkward and utterly unselfconscious enthusiasm with which she proceeds.'

Shana Nys Dambrot