Alchemical Romance

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Flame, 2024 oil on linen 44 x 31 ins.

 

"My spirit moves to tell of shapes transformed/into new bodies." - Ovid

PPOW gallery feels hushed by Judith Linhares's new suite of paintings. There's a chapel-like quality to the room; each painting gives off a subdued glow. But these are not windows; rather, each piece is like a slab of the material that this dimension is made of.

The painted subjects are occupying an impossible space. They defy the normal rules of perception. A motif of a knitted quilt appears under many of the figures and vases of flowers. However, frequently, their own perspective lines throw the vanishing point into the deep distance, even though the shadows on the wall behind the objects make them seem very close. At other times, the knitted surface tilts wildly towards us, pitching the objects out of the canvas as we fall into the "space."

The lighting is often both front-lit, top-lit, and sometimes side-lit too. A recurring double daisy image seems to have flower heads lit on one side and the other in shadow despite this hard light not affecting anything else in the space. The place that we, the viewers, are in seems to light the canvas and create shadows like Plato's cave that dance behind the flowers in an animated cartoony silhouette. This light appears to come from a fire or candles.

In one of the most spectacular paintings in this powerful show, "Flame," the quilt has been shrunk(relative scale also follows its own rules in this world), a figure, which may be the artist as a young girl holding a toy rabbit. We can't make out her expression.

A tiny votive candle on a red bandana casts unflickering shadows in four directions, like the spokes of a wheel. It reminds me of a pavement memorial that you might see in a Hispanic neighborhood. There are doublings and intimations of mortality throughout this show. The light will eventually go out.

Behind it is a disproportionate brass vase sporting dark flowers. Behind that, a double circle of radiating lines is either the apex of a circus tent without its pole or a new kind of nonlight casting a dark double burst.

Judy has always employed stripes. As backgrounds, wallpaper hinted at tents or otherworldly rays of light. They can be parallel or radiating from a single source or, as in "Backyard Bouquet," performing an impossible half zig zag under a vase of flowers.

Flower paintings have long been part of her output. In more figure-orientated shows, they've acted as less loaded images so we can step away from the psychic drama of the figure pieces and enjoy the bliss of her colors and forms entirely for themselves. But now the flower paintings are filled with loaded images. A drawing of two open hands in a book. An old photograph of a man. An image of a pregnant woman is a reminder that in her world, from girlhood to womanhood, women give of themselves and that even though they encounter dangers like narcissistic men, other jealous women, and angry lions, they do so without fear.

In this dimension, we have to accept the rules, whatever they are, or run the risk of having our hippocampus frozen by the contradictions in an unresolvable paralysis.

PPOW Gallery 392 Broadway New York, NY 10013, Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm 

Tel 212-647-1044 (tel:212-647-1044)

info@ppowgallery.co

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