In the arresting painting On Your Side (2024), a person and their cat canoodle in twinned profiles that make it seem like they share an eye—and that’s not even the strangest thing about it. The main figure, shirtless and with glowing minty-pistachio skin, has glossy, deep indigo hair and a serene countenance anchored by a wide, deep blue, orange-ringed eye in a thousand-yard stare. A long, graceful lavender arm reaches across to touch their shoulder, but whose arm? The cat—bright orange, lanky, and intent—stares off into an indeterminate area of vintage-style wallpaper. While utilizing an art historically conventional format—central figure, important object or companion, schematic but familiar background—in its lyrical, extraterrestrial, hyperchromatic actuality, the work of English painter Aly Helyer is anything but.

Color—especially the way Helyer deploys it—contains multitudes, contradictions, narrative, personality, psyche, symbolism, emotion, assonance, dissonance, tension, and flights of fancy. Her optical choreography luxuriates in an unexpected prismatic character that might risk overshadowing the interpretive dimension of the portraits in its symphonics of purple, peach, mauve, brackish gray, fuchsia, goldenrod, tourmaline, chestnut, auburn, denim, and bone. But in compositional choices such as grouping multiple figures or including the cats, birds, snakes, and possibly a horse, as well as through the inventiveness of the figures’ garments—ground the works in the realm of portraiture, and therefore story, despite the siren song of their multi-spectrum razzle-dazzle. Allured by the hues, suddenly involved in the strange strangers’ strange stories, bouncing among eccentric canvases like a bee in a summer garden, the viewer eventually alights at the one in which they see themselves most clearly.