Contributed by Peter Malone / Elizabeth Schwaiger’s paintings, recently shown in “Now & Now & Now” at Nicola Vassell Gallery, are inventive and visually compelling. Her confident brush handling is on full display across 30-plus panels that serve up disorderly interiors, some suggesting artists’ studios. One is apparently based on Picasso’s mid-century studio in Cannes, one of the most photographed art studios in history. Despite its internet-snatched-reversed-horizontal-copyright dodge, which flipped an art nouveau element with a nearby archway, Ward for Abiding Hubris confessed its source. This prompted me to make a mental wager as to whether the art studio meme or the namedropping aside would prove dominant. Fortunately, the former prevailed, and then broadened to other interesting aesthetic matters.
Without help from the gallery staff, however, I was unable to identify the modeling stand and high ceiling in Watchers Waiting as those in Rodin’s famously palatial studio outside Paris. So I readjusted my attention to generic interior views collectively defined by the clutter of a busy if not avaricious resident. A Book of Luminous Things, to take one example, bears little resemblance to an art studio or to any particular function or activity. Yet the dark blue foreground elements create drama by allowing the orange underpainting through to suggest light from windows visible through an indoor garden. By selectively obliterating the warm backlighting with layer upon layer of linear silhouette, the painting’s readable progress bears metaphorical witness to a broadly defined notion of domesticity.
Especially intriguing are deftly sketched summations of chairs, plants, paintings, and less recognizable items strewn across floors, which retain their spontaneous character without destroying that sense of volumetric space crucial to each picture’s foundation. Though loosely painted, expressionist excess is avoided. Paint drips occur but skip the mannered theatrics that insert air-quotes around an artist’s spontaneity. Schwaiger’s touch is both casual and confident, blossoming unexpectedly into brief passages of pseudo-calligraphy. A staccato tower of black ink – the artist uses an eccentric variety of mediums – climbs the upper left edge of Lingering Hours, repeated mysteriously in what appears to be a mirror on the right side of the canvas. It is difficult to resolve exactly what it represents, but, crowned with a sumi-like flourish, the painting makes the viewer appreciate its formal harmony.
Not untypically, the press release for the show oversold the artist’s obligatory statement. Viewers were informed that Schwaiger’s experience of childbirth inspired her interest in the portents of domestic space. While perhaps an intriguing footnote, that fact lost much of its impact by virtue of the non-sequitur about scuba diving that immediately followed. Worse still, a pre-exhibition interviewer for Cultured Magazine apparently encouraged the artist to riff on her multifarious inspirational sources, producing this gurgitation: “comparative pregnancy and childbirth and control of women’s bodies through time and across culture; creative/destructive feminine archetypes and the link between magic, divinity, and the feminine; celebrity and mythification in art history; eschatology, apotropaics, and the warding off of the apocalypse or the role of ritual in the face of inevitability.” And so forth. I suggest that intellectual grocery lists resembling Lucky’s Waiting for Godot soliloquy are, to be delicate, unnecessary.
That said, Schwaiger’s paintings are smart and persuasive. Along with Cathleen Clarke, Njideka Crosby, Andrew Shea,and others, she consciously and skillfully blurs abstract and mimetic elements, advancing a trend I admire and freely endorse.
“Elizabeth Schwaiger: Now & Now & Now,” Nicola Vassell Gallery, 138 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY. January 11–February 24, 2024.
About the author: Peter Malone is a painter who writes about art. He is currently represented by the Silas von Morisse Gallery in New York.
Solid review, makes me want to look up her work. The bit about artist statements sometimes being “intellectual grocery lists” was fantastic! Nice to hear someone call Bullshit on a statement finally.