Named after the English poet and painter William Blake, this series is closely connected to Smith‘s large performative video project around Blake‘s „The Circle of the Lustful“ (1824-1827) - one of the illustrations Blake made for Dante Alighieri‘s „Divine Comedy“. Smith‘s action, that took place at MUAC, Mexico City in May 2019, reinterprets Blake‘s work in the form of a tableau vivant, while each of the paintings shows a blow up of a fragment of the original illustration. As she did in former series Smith combines here different visual concepts which together add up to a complex program but also achieve their effect alone. Though each painting can be read independently, together they evoke a sensation of a disjunctured narrative. Smith aligns this narrative to the way she perceives and edits her films in the sense that new narratives are formed from the misalignment within images.
The blank spaces in the paintings give trace of where the bodies or protagonists in the source image have been removed revealing only the background. We see blown up abstract forms that maybe recognizable or not as part of Blake's work. The paintings form new dialogues by zooming in and out of scale, much like she does with her camera while filming. The focus lies on different scales, textures, and affective associations of fragments, that build new meaning and associations. The way in which the paintings fit within an outer small white frame refers to an ongoing series of small paintings of the same format that Smith developed over the last few years. All paintings evoke a "sketch like" or incomplete feeling, much like how the frame and film work: we see images as a series of cuts one after the other.
