Vanessa Wilson’s paintings exist in a state of flux: figures half-formed, landscapes shifting, colours colliding and dissolving. The Departure Lounge, her 2025 exhibition at Aleph Contemporary, takes its title from the transitory spaces of airports and train stations, but expands into something broader—a meditation on memory, and the psychological terrain of movement.
For Wilson, these questions are deeply personal. Born in Karachi in 1969, and raised across Australia, the UK, and Spain, she has lived a life in motion. Each place leaves an imprint, not as fixed geography but as sensory memory—colour, shape, atmosphere—that resurfaces in her canvases. Her work embraces transition: the threshold between departure and arrival, the uneasy familiarity of the uncanny, the way memory reshapes reality.
Colour is Wilson’s most commanding force. Like the Fauves, she builds emotion rather than description—acid yellows against bruised pinks, purples bleeding into burnt orange. Figures emerge from, and dissolve into, these environments, caught between recognition and abstraction. Her process—collage, layering, improvisation—ensures that nothing remains stable; everything is in play.
Wilson’s work reminds us that life itself is a departure lounge—defined not by arrival, but by the flux of movement, memory, and change.
