Private Views were held on:

Tuesday June 8th, 6.30 - 8.30
Thursday June 10th, 6.30 - 8.30
Sunday June 20th. 12.00 - 3.00

On Sunday June 20th the garden was also be open to the public for the 2004 Chelsea Festival

Viewing at other times was by appointment until July 21st.

Price list of work

You have to be a lot older than Victoria Achache to remember as part of life the London light which pervaded before Parliament banned coal fires in the early 1960s. It was Turner’s light, and Whistler’s. The Impressionists relished it, Monet in particular, when they came to paint here and escape the Franco-Prussian war. Bright colours - a sunset, say, or a van, or a painted awning or even a pullover - glowed rather than shone. The mood was dark fire. No wonder late Rothkos looked so well in the Tate.

Dark fire lurks within the gene pool of British painters. Victoria Achache has mastered it. She is becoming a great colourist, one whose forms emerge from the glow and dissolve within it again. Her human presences are at once domestic and monumental, in the way of good Henry Moores. They are placed with an eye to the formality of old portraits, be they paintings or photographs zust recognise, when life is pared back to its visual elements, that human beings are creatures of light while light lasts for them. Colour only exists between two darknesses and the dark is always trying to break through.

I find it exciting in an age where art is apt to be its own subject and first cause - the long withdrawing roar of Marcel Duchamp, if you like -that Victoria Achache is taking on what only oil paint can do. When you put the stuff on canvas the phenomenal world appears automatically and challenges you to make a go of it and make up your mind about it. For me, Victoria Achache has found things to brood upon, like the slow movements (so often the best) of great musical pieces. How pleasurable it is to confront an artist who thinks in paint once more.

Grey Gowrie
27 April 2004

EXHIBITION REVIEWS

"Victoria Achache's paintings sing with colour and "Girl Sitting"(2004), the painting on the show's invitation is an excellent example.Her work is essentially abstract but with elements of figuration that are sometimes obvious, as in "Couple and Cactus","Father and Son","Pianist" and "Italian couple", all painted in 2003, and sometimes not obvious as in "Girl Sitting" when the large areas of yellow and blue take over but the lines of the girl's figure are just visible.

The artist's drawings and works on paper are very impressive and have developed recently with great confidence.The small drawings remind one of Keith Vaughan at his best.Victoria is an excellent draughtsman (? woman) and has studied drawings by sculptors and even experimented herself with modelling in clay;solid small versions of the people who inhabit her drawings and paintings.The people are always impersonal and universal, with only the title of the work implying some personal connection.Her drawings are powerful with strong lines which is rare today in contemporary art, but the Byam Shaw (where she studied) in the 1970s and 80s taught its students to draw and paint from life, sometimes on the same work for 4-6 weeks.

Victoria Achache has shown at Jonathan Clark gallery in 2002,in Barcelona and France in Europe,at Berkeley Square gallery, New Academy gallery and Jill George gallery in the 1990s.This show at Gallery 286 allows her to show some of the larger paintings as well as the smaller works on paper."Flirtation" in acrylic and charcoal introduces a new lighter range of colours which works very well and seems a happy painting.The artist is always developing ideas and working in new media, very successfully judging by the new works on paper."

Heather Waddell
London Art and Artists Guide

Visit the London Art and Artist Guide web site:

www.hwlondonartandartistsguide.com

For further information about the gallery or exhibition contact Jonathan Ross:
Phone 020 7370 2239
E-mail