Angelica Hopton Echenique (b. 2000)

Angelica Hopton’s Lemons is a beautiful still-life depicting a group of fresh, ripe lemons hanging amongst the thick leaves of a lemon tree. Painted in Tuscany over the summer, the bright light of the Italian country fuses into the painting’s colours with a warmth that is fresh and vitalising. The yellows vie against the greens in a playful contest of mutual triumph: assertive strokes of acrylic paint brush yellows into the leaves and greens into the lemons. The painting is aglow with such a warmth that colours bounce and reflect off different shapes across the canvas. 

Angelica’s Lemons boldly fills the entire canvas in a flat strip; here, it is colour and shape rather than perspectival depth that mould the lemons into three-dimensional, heavy bodies. Reminiscent of Paul Cézanne’s (1839-1906) innovative still-lives, Angelica builds her still-life from careful yet distinct brushstrokes of paint. These ‘constructive brushstrokes’, as Cézanne calls them, give a sculpturesque dimensionality to the lemons and leaves. Set above a thin background of blended acrylics, the lemons and leaves pop out with a heavy prominence that can only be described as a triumph of vitality and colour.

Angelica here turns the ‘nature morte’ (still-life) into a ‘nature vivante’: brushwork, tone, and colour all contribute to a sense of indomitable life within her lemons. Hanging opposite from Cauchoi’s (1850-1911) Nature Morte à la Brioche, Lemons strikes an interesting challenge to the history of vanity, decadence and death within the genre. Paired with Fischetti’s (1732-1792) Ratto di Europa, the two pictures exchange a story of playfulness in bright yellow that spans almost three centuries, from ornate gold-leaf to energised acrylic.