Larissa Bates’s paintings construct an intimate and symbol-laden universe where everyday feminine rituals—combing hair, dressing, petting a dog—are elevated into lush choreographies of tenderness, excess, and quiet power, transforming domestic actions into sacred gestures through vivid palettes, intricate textile motifs, and theatrical compositions that blur the lines between care, luxury, and devotion; her use of baroque detail and ornamental density challenges conventional visual narratives that sideline older female bodies and the domestic sphere, instead reimagining them as spaces of aesthetic sovereignty and ritualized agency, often infused with a soft surrealism that disorients as much as it enchants, as in the portrayal of a woman enveloped in cloud-like textures—possibly foam, possibly vapor—receiving attentive grooming from a gloved figure, a scene that hovers between clinical care and spa indulgence, conjuring themes of aging, control, and pleasure within ambiguous boundaries; another work features an elderly woman on a plush violet couch beside a majestic green dog, set against a backdrop resembling both royal tapestry and home altar, reinforcing the domestic as a domain of dignity, presence, and personal myth-making; throughout her oeuvre, Bates reclaims ornamentation not as frivolity but as a mode of visual assertion, turning fabric, fur, and flesh into languages of resistance and reinvention, where femininity, age, and care are not marginal details but central icons in a reenchanted domestic imaginary.
