Julie Fragar

Frequently raw and traumatic in their emotional tenor, Julie Fragar’s paintings are driven by a deeply personal narrative of experience. Her work has been intimate and domestic, quiet and introspective, but also foreboding and even violent in its intense scrutiny of the closest, warmest, coldest and most fraught relationships we negotiate – with partners, children, mothers and, perhaps most painfully, our selves.

Her self-portrait for The National 2019 is full of deftly communicated information, rich with associations and narrative threads, and at the same time formally disrupted, deliberately incoherent. Yet the multiple scenarios played out here all lead to the same certainty; our universal, simple story – life ends. We all move towards this end but how we get there is generally not known. Through her many possible deaths, Fragar rehearses her future. She makes visible what she will never see and yet is compelled to imagine. It is a dizzying virtuoso performance by an artist who seems to be rushing headlong to the next idea, the next collision with experience, the next thing that painting can be; and in this work, towards an absolute end. As with so much of Fragar’s work, this is a labyrinthine accumulation of the traces and scars of what a life amounts to and arrives at, all according to an acute interrogation of shared experience understood and communicated through painting.

While Fragar has often layered and fractured imagery, she has made this increasingly complex and cacophonous. Such devices give weight to her personalised subjects but also amplify the stuff of paint. The latter provides a distance to what might otherwise be a cloying self-absorption or too ardent an attention to the fidelity of figuration. Her disruption of the picture plane is both compelling and confounding. Its density and complexity of visual information is hypnotic – in the slow, careful contemplation the works demand from their viewer – but also visually assaulting, in that we are thrown around the canvas searching for links between clearly discernible elements that must surely combine to make a narrative, and yet fiercely resist that possibility.

Do these paintings show us Julie Fragar, the person, her interior life, her most intimate self? It is only because we can answer yes and, more importantly, no to that question that these paintings are as good as they are. If this were all Fragar we would squirm, be embarrassed, sense too large an ego, too particular an experience. But Fragar connects us, like a thunderclap, to a shared experience, because she also assumes a role, she plays a part, albeit a highly authentic and affecting one, that comes to her through her own particular life. With this yes-but-no understanding of the origins of her work, we can allow ourselves to engage with it and all it refers to, to make that our experience, recognise what it is to be in that place, formed by those particular intersections of fate and hope. In this way, it is the simultaneous particularity and universality of what Fragar makes clear to us that is perhaps her greatest achievement.

The tremendous pace and volume of Fragar’s art is amplified by the weight of its themes. The intensity and velocity she maintains reminds us, shows us that painting can make us catch and hold our breath as we ask, how does it end?