Naomi Frears @ Beaux Arts, London

Sometimes you may just have to look away.
To spend time with the work of Naomi Frears is an overwhelmingly evocative experience, full of open endings and expectations, a period of ambiguous haunting. To say that she makes emotional paintings would be to sell them short: they are psychological explorations, always charged, modestly euphoric. She doesn’t let the viewer off easily, in other words.
Something supremely fertile happens in her new collection of work, and while some of the pictures talk directly to the artist’s previous concerns – errant nature, ethereal pleasures, wandering figures in outlying scenery – much is strikingly new: a stronger figurative expressiveness, a toughening of the images in a lusher context. The paintings carry both intensity and serenity, and a clear maturity. You can’t leave this display unaffected or underwhelmed; you may need a break before re-entering the plain world