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In a 2019 interview with artist Sangram Majumdar, Magalie Guérin acknowledged:
I don’t consider [my paintings] in summary phrases. I consider them as constructions of shapes that exist on the planet, regardless that you possibly can’t acknowledge them. You don’t know what they’re, however you sense that they ARE. […] There’s gravity. There’s a floor. A figure-ground relationship. There’s a logical sense of development.
Embracing all the probabilities that all-over abstraction supposedly rendered out of date, Guérin’s assertion resonated with one thing that Thomas Nozkowski mentioned to me in an interview in 2010, after I requested him if his work got here from private expertise:
Sure, however taking that concept within the broadest doable method. Occasions, issues, concepts — something. Objects and locations within the visible continuum, positive, but additionally from different arts and summary techniques.
Each Guérin and Nozkowski are summary artists who discover a subjective house that the latter helped open up, beginning within the mid-Nineteen Seventies, when Conceptual artwork outmoded portray. It’s a route in abstraction that has been largely ignored as a result of the important narrative of Twentieth-century abstraction that has dominated Western artwork historical past focuses on the pursuit of objectivity, with an emphasis on exterior constructions, such because the grid, two-dimensionality, paint as paint, and post-easel scale. Working from reminiscence, Nozkowski undermined these measures of objectivity with skewed grids and irregular geometric shapes drawn from the panorama or issues he skilled or examine.
That is what hyperlinks Guérin and Nozkowski in my thoughts. After visiting the exhibition Magalie Guérin: some mondegreens at Sikkema Jenkins, I really feel that Guérin, born in 1973, is among the greatest summary artists of her technology. I had seen a few her work in a bunch present in the summertime of 2022, once we had been colleagues briefly on the Ox-Bow Faculty of Artwork. After I discovered that she had earned her MFA on the Faculty of the Artwork Institute of Chicago, I questioned what her connection was to artists equivalent to Julia Fish, Miyoko Ito, and Barbara Rossi — summary painters residing and dealing in Chicago who belong to no group and usually are not linked to any tendencies or kinds. What struck me instantly about Guérin’s work was that it neither seemed like anybody else’s nor instantly disclosed its that means.
Whereas I don’t assume there may be any direct affect, I do sense a commonality amongst these artists, in addition to Nozkowski, through which the evocative prospects of paint are explored within the service of subjective, on a regular basis expertise. The youngest of those artists, Guérin is within the line between portray and drawing, between the unique and the copy, and the house between seeing and comprehending. The gallery’s web site explains that the exhibition title
refers back to the phonological idea of the mondegreen: an occasion of aural misinterpretation, such because the misheard line of lyrics that provides the phrases or phrases new that means. Essentially, mondegreens come up from the human thoughts’s need for comprehension, enacting a course of via which the unfamiliar turns into acknowledged, signified, and assimilated into one’s understanding of the world.
The exhibition’s 11 work, ranging in measurement from 20 by 16 to 45 by 36 inches, are vertical, suggesting a portrait or a determine. The palette consists of various hues of inexperienced, umber, orange, black, white, yellow, and violet. Guérin paints on a topographical floor she has ready, marked by slight ridges or shallow pathways. In some works, the colour conforms to the pathway; in others, she ignores the topography. In “Untitled (CTG)” (2023), she does each. I see this slippage as central to her portray. She needs to develop an ambiguous house the place a type could remind you of a head or a vase, however you possibly can’t be certain.
Guérin appears within the essential second that Philip Guston reached within the mid-Sixties, when head-like shapes started to appear in his work. Nonetheless, slightly than crossing over into figuration, as Guston did, Guérin depicts a world of gravity and house occupied by shapes which are each particular and unknown. Within the exhibition’s work, she appears to ascertain a set of boundaries concerning her palette. She makes no overt reference to sky, so we aren’t positive the place her painted world exists. What the viewer encounters is a self-contained house that doesn’t fairly allow us to in nor preserve us out. Artwork historic associations, equivalent to Artificial Cubist nonetheless lifes, come to thoughts and rapidly recede. I discover this exhilarating. Guérin follows a trajectory whose vacation spot stays unknown till the portray is accomplished. Attentive to color’s a number of identities and alert to the totally different textures of issues, she applies the paint in a different way in every space, shifting from skinny to pasty.
In “Untitled (CC2)” (2023), it’s arduous to not see a big foot within the portray’s decrease right-hand nook. This is among the few situations the place I felt I may determine one thing in Guérin’s work, and I used to be stunned to see it. There’s something humorous about placing a foot in an summary portray, and she or he is aware of it. The suggestion of handles, rounded kinds, carpets, architectural particulars, and cutout shapes all invite the viewer’s hypothesis. The world arrived at in these work is each full and enigmatic.
Magalie Guérin: some mondegreens continues at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. (530 West twenty second Road, Chelsea, Manhattan) via July 28. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
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