Victoria Achache makes paintings and drawings based on the figure, in an interior or landscape setting. The figures are drawn with oddly poignant exploratory lines, beguilingly tentative but defining, the settings are blocked in with colour in striking combinations. These colour patches either modulate subtly or contrast more strongly to provide an illusion of space: they combine a decorative element with a real sense of mise en scène. 'Passing By', 2006-7 (left) marks a new psychological complexity mirrored in the greater interplay between abstract and figurative impulses. Memorable.

Andrew Lambirth writing in the Spectator 2007

Dark fire lurks within the gene pool of British painters. Victoria Achache has mastered it. She is becoming a great colourist, one whose forms emerge from the glow and dissolve within it again. Her human presences are at once domestic and monumental, in the way of good Henry Moores. They are placed with an eye to the formality of old portraits, be they paintings or photographs. They are awesome to the viewer and to each other. It is as if you must recognise, when life is pared back to its visual elements, that human beings are creatures of light while light lasts for them. Colour only exists between two darknesses and the dark is always trying to break through.

Lord Gowrie 2004