Who helps you through Hump Day? This delicately rendered painting by Hong Kong-born artist Firenze Lai demonstrates the artist’s interest in evoking the primal feeling that underlines a scene, rather than any sense of pictorial realism. She describes her evocative output as figurative, shunning the term portraiture. Indeed, the people that populate her work are usually of indeterminate gender, while their locations are at once familiar and indeterminate, and frequently claustrophobic. The idea, she says, is for the viewer to forget the painter behind the work and to relate directly to the emotion it conveys. This depiction of three entangled figures struggling to run feels particularly pertinent as as we reach the mid-week mark.
