The art of Estelle Thompson ruminates around the basic foundations of the practice of painting itself: namely form, colour, surface, and space. These are the core underpinnings of painting across history that persist continually, often in vogue but sometimes not. Through a daring, expansive, and investigative exploration of abstraction, Estelle’s paintings have consistently spoken to balance and order, logic and harmony, and the systems and relationships which hold these together. In a quest to solve a problem, her practice in fact asks questions: How can painting operate? What are the limits of the canvas? Does the work exist within itself? Can a work exist in itself?

Meticulous and detail-oriented, there is an architectural understanding and consideration of space with a counterpoint of material exploration of colour and texture in Estelle’s paintings. At once formal and deeply aesthetic, there is also an elasticity and an open referential pool to her work. Estelle reminds us of the vastness of abstraction and the ways it can draw you in through your own understanding and relation to it. Her paintings become a way of apprehending space or meditating on the stillness of a form, to consider the beauty of being.

In Estelle's work, there is a vernacular for the familiar of our quotidian experience. We see brick formations seemingly taken and abstracted from the everyday, swatches from streaky windows or water residue on an advertisement board, an iridescent sunset that might only be witnessed on the Pacific Coast of Mexico. The visual forms which the retina sees, internalises, and processes become something pictorial and, through this, immediately associative.

Despite the rigour and almost scientific precision of both surface and composition, there remains an innate poetics of space. Each fragment or block contains a purity of colour and definitude and, as a result, an emotional and spiritual charge. Estelle invites the eye to wander and the mind to meander.

I often come back to the idea of trial and error when looking at Estelle’s paintings. Across her practice, many of the same formal tropes or visual languages have been returned to, irrevocably challenging and testing new possibilities of how they can exist in a myriad of ways. These transmutations reveal an ongoing desire to test the potential of an idea as to how a form might exist, be recycled, and unravel into a new composition. Hers is a complex process of exploring new configurations and arrangements, assembly and reordering so that the once familiar and known becomes unfamiliar and magical. Each of these trials of abstraction produces stillness and chaos in equilibrium—a call to order.

Malik Al-Mahrouky