Joanna van Son is Refracting the Moment
- Mar 24
- 4 min read
By Eva-Dawn Speight
There is a song that has been swimming around my head lately. It centres around a refrain that becomes increasingly distorted as it repeats—echo, echo, echo, echo, I love you—fracturing into uncertainty, urgency, and then finally desperation. It is not a question, but it probes like one at the vulnerable concern of who we are to someone else, or even ourselves. I think in many ways Joanna van Son paints in search of an answer. She explores the echo’s same tension between absence and presence, a paradoxical thing that somehow leaves and comes back to you, and whether it is possible to hold on to it forever.
Saatchi Yates’s sterile white cube interior is already skirting the St James’s strip on Thursday evening, and it is even fuller than usual for a private viewing. The crowd, replete with alert and vaguely familiar faces, has spilt out onto the pavement and is puffing into a communal cloud of smoke that hangs loosely above like a jellyfish. Just behind, the gallery windows have fogged from condensation, suffusing any initial glimpses of the show into mulchy squares of warmth.
A street party-adjacent turnout is hardly surprising for van Son’s widely anticipated solo debut, following her feature in last summer’s Once Upon a Time in London. Showcasing an astute multigenerational lineup that sought to contextualise some of the city’s most exciting emerging artists against their doyen predecessors, the show was received critically as something of a proposal for a YBAs encore. If that’s the case, van Son quickly found her footing in the reprise alongside the likes of peers Olaolu Slawn and Cato while gesturing ample homage to her core references, from Caravaggio to Cecily Brown. It’s a balance that is no small feat to strike, yet she has again, effortlessly, in each of the new works featured in this exhibition. Safe to say, it makes for a succinct account of her genre-spanning impulses, which may be central to her allure.
I will always be weak for the rush that hits when an ostensibly abstract painting reveals itself to be more figurative than initially thought; when you hit just the right distance, and suddenly the surface breaks into a luminous refraction of faces and limbs, and it’s like seeing your own life from an angle you didn’t know existed. Van Son is masterful at inducing this. Generous in her facture, she piles thick swirls of creams, pinks, and browns like buttercream on a cake to render the most potent synecdoches of intimacy: an outstretched arm, two meeting tongues, a contorted torso as febrile as one of Paulo Rego’s women. There is so much movement, it roars.
Van Son describes her process as ‘figmenting circumstance from a figure itself,’ in that she explores the female form in all its complexities by way of studies of herself and her fiancée, Lilah, in her studio, at home, or from memory. But it’s her interruptions that are so arresting, as though slapping the lucidity of these figments with a sudden dart of ochre, or a streak of white so sharp it seems to cut through the canvas itself, revealing nothing but absence. Memory does, after all, lose its clarity over time.
Impervious to horror vacui, she often leaves large stretches of linen entirely vacant, laying bare the charcoal blueprintesque underdrawings that evidence her architectural training. Palimpsests of words and phrases—‘all the nights,’ ‘feet,’ ‘idle,’ ‘bigger than me,’ ‘cups’—teeter on eavesdropping on some private conversation with either herself or her partner, maybe both. Standing in front of White Chair (2025), my eyes lower to where, just kissing the edge of the frame, are the words ‘so I could taste you.’ It is almost too intimate to stand in front of without feeling your own heart rupture.
There is something so deeply affective about van Son’s desire to capture and prolong these moments. She makes the act of viewing feel like peering inside a spinning zoetrope. For all her sensibilities, she somehow delineates the surreal experience of falling in love: that urgency in each fleeting second to collapse time itself and re-stretch it on a canvas just to study how one person exists, moves, breathes. Compositional balance and therefore logic are, for the most part, eschewed as our gaze is drawn spasmodically towards each new, shifting focal point, never loosening or settling.
So it’s in almost relieving contrast when works such as Turtleneck (2025) or Black Water (2025) nod towards more traditional notions of portraiture, redolent of Alice Neel. These evoke a more precise sense of longing (or gratitude) for moments of domestic stillness for someone who has spent most of their life in motion: born in Oman, van Son was raised in China, Russia and the UK, settling in London where she has lived and worked since training at the Bartlett, save some international residencies. It feels integral to the show’s dialogue of intimacy, that is, of what it means to understand yourself through another.
As staff approach the floor for a final wine glass sweep and conversations lull, applause bursts from the other side of the room. Van Son is handed a bouquet of white roses, clad in thick brown paper, and briefly lowers their hefty weight to the floor to spring back up and slip her arm around her partner; they pose for a quick flurry of flashes, giddy and proud. All eyes are on them now, the artist and her muse. By this I mean ours, but also all the eyes of all the figures of all the paintings, which have sprung anew in these four gallery walls. It seems she has made a convincing argument that it might be possible—that familiar want—to relive a moment ad infinitum, to exist forever in the echo.
Joanna van Son is on display at Saatchi Yates until the 16th of April 2026. https://saatchiyates.com/exhibitions/joanna-van-son
