Twisted Beats: eight abstracts

Most of Melanie Viola’s work starts with a camera. Twisted Beats doesn’t. The eight prints in the series are made of flat shapes with rounded edges, closer to paper cut-outs than to photography, on a white ground.

Two halves

The series falls into two groups of four. The first four are loose and open: branching forms in terracotta, blush pink, sand and grey, laid over a pale block of colour. Their titles say what they resemble. No. 1 is “The Beginning”, No. 3 is “Corals” and No. 4 is “Underwater”. No. 2, “Funky Seventies”, is the only one with a mustard yellow in it.

The second four are a different mood. The shapes turn solid black and crowd together until they nearly fill the sheet, with a single patch of salmon pink behind them. The titles get louder to match: “The Rising”, “Happy”, “Hey, what’s up?” and finally “Party”, the densest of the eight.

Where it sits in her work

Her biography describes “graphic nuances” and “modern color accents” alongside the city photographs, and mentions that the portfolio holds decorative digital art as well as urban pictures. This series is the plainest example of that side of it. The numbering skips No. 8, and four of the titles carry a “.2”.

Pairing them

The two halves work differently on a wall. The earth-toned four are quiet enough to hang as a group. The black ones carry more weight, and one of them holds a wall by itself. “The Rising” is the bridge between the two: black shapes, but with room around them.