The AITY Gallery is pleased to introduce a newfound talent, Alison Thomet, a South African artist whose practice shifts between figuration and abstraction. Working in acrylic and mixed media, she balances structure and spontaneity in layered compositions that explore the transient nature of identity and perception.
Alison Thomet’s practice bridges a diverse multi-disciplinary background, lending her work a distinctive balance of structure and spontaneity. Thomet navigates the space between representation and obfuscation, allowing faces and forms to emerge through a process of layering, disruption, and revision. Her compositions are marked by bold elements and considered colour palettes, often exploring the tension between control and collapse. Through this push and pull, her paintings reflect on the fluidity of identity, memory, and perception – where clarity is continually undone to keep the image fresh and alive.
Q – Across Taking Liberties, Raising Lambs, and Where the Hell Is My Village, the figure seems to oscillate between recognisable portrait and abstraction. How do you negotiate that threshold between depicting a person and allowing the image to dissolve into painterly gesture?
A – While painting, I employ a variety of tactics to try and “trick” my brain into not being too literal, careful or “perfect”. As with so many other artists, the ideal is to reach a flow state so that ultimately what is conveyed comes from deep within, it’s completely intuitive. In this way, the subject matter or figure emerges on its own and can be a surprise even to me. I’m also interested in moments where the figure almost fails. That edge—where a face nearly collapses into abstraction or a body threatens to fragment—is often where the painting feels most alive. It mirrors how we experience people in reality: never fully graspable, always partially projected, remembered, or misread. Letting the image hover there keeps the work open, and it asks the viewer to complete the figure rather than simply consume it.
Q – Your surfaces reveal an active process of construction and disruption—marks layered and reasserted. How important is the idea of revision or instability in the way an identity or place emerges within these paintings?
A – I am in constant state of tug of war when I am painting. I will build up and then break down surfaces. Often removing marks or colours that I was enjoying and replacing them with those I don’t. It is a pendulum. Getting to the point when a work is complete is a delicate decision. It is only when I step back to look and feel genuine excitement that I know I am close. A clean, resolved surface can imply certainty, by contrast, a surface that carries scars and contradictions suggests something more honest – identity as something under constant pressure from history, memory, and circumstance. In Where the Hell Is My Village, for example, the repeated building up and breaking down of forms echoes the instability of belonging itself.
Q – Colour in these works feels both expressive and somewhat psychological – the vivid green face in Raising Lambs or the cooler, shifting blues of Where the Hell Is My Village. How do you go about selecting a colour palette for these works, and do they operate as a symbolic/emotional device or are they purely structural?
A – I purposely start with a very limited palette, not exceeding 3 colours. These colours I have chosen from my observations of life – I will see them together in a beautiful room, somewhere in nature, in a photograph or even used in another artwork I admire. I like to build up a bank of imagery or colours that inspire me. While painting, I will often surround myself somehow with these references. I will work exclusively with these colours until they almost feel uncomfortable – past the point where I am happy with the composition or where a subject has presented itself. Only then do I introduce other colours, to exaggerate a meaning or highlight a conflict. I am attracted to bold colours in this instance to force a discord almost. At the same time, I rely heavily on intuition and revision. I’ll often lay down a colour that feels wrong and then work with that wrongness rather than correcting it. That misalignment can open up unexpected emotional registers. If a palette becomes too coherent or harmonious, I’ll deliberately interrupt it – introducing an acidic note, a deadened patch, or a clashing temperature – to reintroduce friction. Harmony can be seductive, but it can also flatten complexity. So I use colour as both a structural and an emotive device.
Q – The titles carry a strong narrative or rhetorical charge. How do they function in relation to the paintings themselves – are they guiding interpretation, complicating it, or opening another conceptual layer? Do they come before or after the painting is finished?
A – Without a title or concept, the work carries no relationship to its creator. It’s critical in understanding what the artist is attempting to portray. I feel that artworks need to convey an expression, otherwise what is point of them? I start considering the name of a work, somewhere in the middle of the process and decide conclusively on it just before I am finished . The title then helps guide me to the end. I try to keep the name open to interpretation so that viewers can resonate with it and find meaning within their own paradigm too. Often my titles are purposefully irreverent, to remind viewers to almost enjoy the conflict. Just as the surface of the painting holds revisions and disruptions, the relationship between image and title should provoke conversation and thought. The viewer is pulled between what the image is doing visually and what the title seems to imply conceptually, and that gap is important. Meaning happens in that friction.
Q – There’s a tension between intimacy and estrangement in these works – the faces feel close, and simultaneously distant. Are you interested in how painting can both reveal and obscure?
A – I think it’s the ultimate compliment for me if an observer of my work gets both a sense of intimacy and estrangement from my figures. In life, one rarely feels one or the other between people so if I am able to portray that, then I have succeeded in a goal. It also invites the viewer to choose what they feel looking at the piece and engage more personally with the work in a dynamic way – almost as if engaging in a constant conversation with the subject. Importantly, the obscuring isn’t strategic in a pre-planned way; it emerges through process. I’ll often work a face toward clarity and then undo it, not because clarity is wrong, but because it feels too final. Undoing becomes a way of reopening the image, allowing doubt back in. The painting ends up carrying multiple states at once – moments of exposure alongside moments of withdrawal.
