The Chocolate Box Paintings
Janice McNab
16 July - 27 August 2005

This solo exhibition by artist Janice McNab showcases a series of oil paintings that transform mundane details of everyday life into highly-charged paintings. Five of these oil paintings depict scaled up details of the empty plastic trays of chocolate boxes, the others deal with associated themes in the form of topiaried trees and night interiors. Painted as fragments without edges, these paintings can also be read as landscapes.

McNab's painting looks straightforward and realistic, employing the reality of the photograph for their source material. The viewer is, however, continually returned to the essential fiction of a painted surface. Even as painting is a document, it is always a metaphor and in the silence McNab constructs within these new paintings lies an unsettling world.

"McNab became fascinated with the packaging in chocolate boxes. She presents them as science-fiction-like landscapes, shiny and rolling, in close-up, stretched out over the whole surface of the painting. A recognisable and yet alienating pattern that seems meaningless at first, but is nevertheless an everyday part of our lives. Empty luxury wrappings as proof of our excessive consumption. An implicit reference to excess and an indication of the relativity of the things that occupy our minds. Wrappings and boxes veiling a certain emptiness." from the essay commissioned to accompany the exhibition by Tanja Elstgeest, art historian/curator at De Veenfabriek, Leiden, The Netherlands

Installation View


Installation View


Installation View


Janice McNab, Belgian Creams, 2005


Janice McNab, Continentals, 2005


Janice McNab, Gardens, 2005


Janice McNab, Seashell Banquet, 2005

Janice McNab, Morning, 2005