Women on the Verge

They're as confessional and confusing as someone showing you their bones. Hinting at strange and necessary secrets, the postures of the women who dwell in Margherita Manzelli's pictures are inert and peculiar, punctuated by stilted introspective gestures. Frozen within the confines of the paintings and works on paper, something appears to be beyond their comprehension - as if some deep-seated, unspoken obsession is leaking out of the thin paint and hard lines that delineate their existence.

Perhaps these women are just exhausted - some of the titles of Manzelli's most recent paintings are named after sleeping aids: Neobros, Stilnox and Diencephale (all works 1998). The tired skin of their faces seems riddled with insomnia, caught in the hallucinogenic glare of late-night supermarkets. The only sign of movement is in their eyes or their fingers: the flickering, needy indicators of something, someone or somewhere else. Colour is peeled away like a layer of clothing, until only the solid threads of canvas or paper remain; the lines that distinguish the body from air. Dangling limbs, manipulated by subtle distortions in scale, often fade away, tucked beneath a resting body or curved across the division of a real space and a void. The act of painting itself - a way of passing through, and registering experience - has somehow claimed something from the anxiety that prompted the creation of these women. The drawing is exquisite. Fluctuating between an intense scrutiny of detail and a disparaging disdain of surface, it lends these excursions into nocturnal dissolution an appropriately dream-like combination of oppression and equivocation.

For all their disjunction, Manzelli's women inhabit spaces that are as consistently symmetrical as they are filled with an oddly benevolent anxiety. Her subjects may seem slightly unhinged, but her handling of them insists that their lack of equilibrium is infused with a certain logic - like a child finding the perfectly balanced centre of a see-saw. Large areas of nothingness zoom into the centre of the picture plane, only to collide with bodies which throb with concentrated detail: twisted fingers pluck at an ingrown hair or hover uncertainly above a thigh; bewildered faces split open with large eyes and otherworldly smiles, framed with bony shoulders and tapering, frighteningly flexible wrists. But for all their self-absorption, they never stop watching you looking at them. These are pictures complicated by the things that usually complicate apparently straightforward situations - a glance, a gesture, the ambiguous meanings that reside in and confuse the bluntest of intentions.

A woman sits demurely on an office chair, her stockings around her ankles, her hands curled together in her lap (Neobros). Another, in heavy walking boots, emerges from a psychedelic, cell-like gloom, her hands held out beside her naked body, her head protected by a colourful beanie (Diencephale). The crudest way of exposing yourself may be to remove a piece of clothing, but sometimes it's also the most effective - nudity as an indicator of emotional openness. For Manzelli, however, naked skin functions like a confused and emotional border guard, not sure of who or what should be allowed in. In this sense, her women fluctuate between reticence and an almost overwhelming volubility.

None of the women are the same, but they echo each other like room-mates in the same psychic space. Their narrow limbs and oversized heads may be childlike, but their expressions are old and weary, as if memories of their former, more innocent selves had run amok and collapsed exhausted into the comfort of their own arms or the weight of their own spine. At times, their yearning is intensely sexual, but any development of their sexuality is permanently frustrated by the paint that imprisons them. Of indeterminate age, they could wait forever in the space they occupy to be filled with something more concrete than atmosphere or gloomy patterns. To escape they'd have to leap into the void - but most of them don't even have the necessary limbs to propel themselves. It's as if their bodies have become the walls of an eternal transit lounge in a nondescript airport.

The problem of being someone else's creation means that you can never change the way you look. Manzelli has painted a group of women who demand a certain intimacy from their audience but who have no control over how they might appear. As a result, there's an expectancy about their lack of realisation, as if they're waiting for someone to complete the unfinished sentence that has become their existence. But although they may appear to be worried or simply preoccupied, their self-absorption isn't crude or easily explained. They lean into the atmosphere like they're looking for some kind of abstract support, pushing against themselves, or into someone they're thinking about who won't ever arrive. Ultimately though, you can never know what they're thinking - they're pictures; it's in their nature to keep you guessing. They stare out at you with the implacable disingenuity of exhausted spies.