Contributed by Michael Brennan / Nora Riggs tells stories of our modern lives, recording their details. Her mindfully hung exhibition at Tappeto Volante, titled “Uneasy Listening,” traces how her paintings developed, beginning with four small gouaches placed on the lefthand wall of the front chamber. They appear as modest studies. But they also isolate anxious drama, such as that of a young woman searching for a missing earring on the dance floor, in a different way than the larger paintings in the main chamber do. The gouaches feel more interior, spotlighting vignettes, whereas the larger paintings pass searchlights over more expansive tales. Riggs’s gouaches also reveal her penchant for pattern and decoration, leading me to suspect that she’s internalized the lessons of Matisse.
To the right of the gouaches are four medium-sized oil paintings that operate like landscapes of still lives. Insofar as they depict many objects simultaneously, a painter like Manny Farber comes to mind. None remains a single focal point – as a fish would not when seen in a crowded aquarium – even though each individual object has been studied and rendered in shorthand.
Riggs excels at documenting the sundry objects that to an extent define our everyday lives and provides a range of them to glom onto. In a quick glance, I seemed to focus on sweets and drugs, spotting a Chewbacca mug, a loose Tylenol, a sealed Sudafed, a pink sugar wafer, an unwrapped Starburst, a pyramidal row of Toblerone chocolate, a pussy willow branch, an elastic ponytail twin hair tie, an Andes chocolate mint, a bottle of Tylenol, a rubbery finger puppet monster from the ‘70s, and some Swedish Fish.
The surfaces of Riggs’s paintings are flat and dense, not so different from her gouaches but thicker and more impacted. She paints in oil without medium, using solvent only to loosen her paint. Her technique is simple, not unlike Edward Hopper’s. Riggs’s paintings have significant surfaces of varied pressure, territory painting still commands. Her rich density and clustering of color reminds me somewhat of the late abstractions of Ralph Humphrey – another lover of Matisse and the School of Paris – in which he applied paint over modeling paste.
I’ve been leaning heavily French in this review, but there is much about Riggs’s work that is particularly and peculiarly American. While looking at her large paintings in the main chamber, I thought of Philip Evergood. The two share a vintage strangeness, evident mostly in their favored choice of football-shaped eyes.
There are many custom details in Rigg’s work, including this Martha Graham moment in which a foot flattens against the floor and wall simultaneously.
Several of the larger paintings are defined by a more complex shifting and shafting of light.
Her characters are often disarming, and some seem immediately familiar as sister or daughter stand-ins, like Maybonne from Lynda Barry’s once weekly comics.
Riggs’s work is charming and more. She is cultivating a paradoxically primitive sophistication, painting lumber-heavy limbs and playing with spatial incongruities, like Henri Rousseau but in a distinctly twenty-first century style. Riggs is not alone in exploring the possibilities of this now widespread trend in contemporary art, and inventively moves the quest forward.
“Nora Riggs: Uneasy Listening,” Tappeto Volante, 126 13th Street, Brooklyn, NY. Through April 21, 2024.
About the author: Michael Brennan is a Brooklyn-based painter who writes on art.
Thorough, insightful review! Michael Brennan brings the haunting work of Nora Riggs at Tappeto Volante into context with stark clarity. Thank you for the enjoyable read!
I’m interested in how Riggs’ creates a focal point with the use of patterns, this helps cultivate the narrative. Enhancing things further, also the design and composition are superb, the figure fits well in the picture plane. Very nicely done!