4.12.24 — Thinking of Still Life
“Sex and Death” may sound like a Woody Allen film, with all his surfeit of certainty and irony. But no, it is still life by Rachael Catharine Anderson, not in the least weighed down by either one. All she wants, as a work’s title puts it, is Space for Thought, at Signs and Symbols through April 13.
She finds it, too, but in the space of a painting—a space that grows more shallow and suggestive the more you look. She might have taken the gallery’s own narrow space on Houston Street and compressed it further. It has room all the same for things that refuse to die.
Anderson has done her level best to kill things off, in the very the act of construction. Somehow, though, they are still standing. Scissors have just cut off a fig leaf, which balances nonetheless, its stem on a narrow table or ledge. It might be leaning against the back wall or standing in front with no visible means of support. Light pours directly down, to judge by its tiny shadow, illuminating every vein of its surface. Yet it leaves the wall in darkness.
She loves the fragility of things about to die. Plums lie still uneaten, while bare twigs grow into intricate constructions. Most have no obvious source of light, but enough to multiply the shadows. This could be artificial light, like that of the gallery, which draws shades over its windows. It could also be Winter Light, as the tallest and most delicate work has it, for a time of encroaching darkness. Sharon Louden, in the gallery’s previous show (through March 2) used her colorful installation to mirror and to dismember visitors, but here everything is intact, for now.
A painting’s shape and illumination recall light boxes by such artists as Joseph Cornell, a born collector, which makes it the space of memory. It is an enclosure that no human touch can shatter. The scissors, their task done, lie on the ledge, cut off at front by the picture plane but no closer to you for that. Most of all, this is a space for thought. Anderson speaks of the “pensive image,” quoting Hanneke Grootenboer, a writer new to me. The latter, in turn, sees “art as a form of thinking.”
Sex and Death 101 really is a film, but a sci-fi film—with, as far as I can determine, no particular concern for thought. Yet sex and death are also the theme of still life in Dutch and Flemish painting. Cecily Brown makes a point of the tradition in her own painting. Things are sexy for her because they are alive and dying. At the same time, they defy death, in showing off the artist’s virtuosity and art’s ability to last. She paints big, bright and “all over,” refusing the very stillness of still life.
Anderson is not half so as confident. She quotes Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher and mathematician, in 1670. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” Maybe so, but the paintings also allay fears, with the solidity of subdued color, painted ceramics, and marble dust in oil. My favorites, though, are the branching vegetation and its wispy shadows. Things do not look particularly sexy, much less dead, and a good thing, too.