Trust Issue

Mary Temple: Rough in the Distant Glitter
Pamela Salisbury Gallery
Hudson, NY
May 17 - June 15, 2025

"Devoid of locus, there is nothing to objectify." Nagarjuna (2nd C)

It's another important time for painters. Digital Art, Photography, and Video Art have all suffered because of social media. We have endured so many ghastly lies and had so many useless products foisted on us that all remote artwork feels untrustworthy. Anything with a physical quality or that is as unlike a phone image as possible is true.

With a landscape painting, you feel as though you are witnessing a genuine response to a real place. You are looking at a different place, in a different time, asking yourself, "Whose eyes am I looking through?"

Temple mixes abstraction and figuration approaches together. Or rather, certain modes of abstraction are employed to convey space. Different artists and times come to your eye as you pass over the surface. A Whitten-like smear, an occluded Guston blodge, a treacley Mitchell line. Compactified dimensions whose works are revealed across a small surface.

It also happens along the Z axis. She situates the viewer a certain number of paces away from the painting—the place where it coalesces. The closer you get, the more it disintegrates into abstraction.

It's one of the many dualities of this show. Hot/cold, light/shadow, close/far. The blue and the orange. One representing the physical, the other representing light, the évanescent.

These landscape and seascape paintings are mostly empty. There are no obvious stand-ins for the figure, like a landform or a lone tree. Snowy branches bend ant-like arms, creating an empty frame.

"Pond with Early Snow III" increases the chromatic value of different parts to distract your attention from the whole. The snow obscures areas of the scene. The water, the land, and the sky share colours. Everything teeters on the edge. It's all part of dematerializing the subject.

Her "Campfire in Snow I" painting finally fills the space, acting as a mediator between the blue and the orange. You are no longer looking into a clearing but are focused on an object and an activity. The flame crackles in swathes of hot colour, melting the blue. The broken branches take on a broken figure appearance, like an abstracted body.

Mary's paintings work well on social media. They transform well into posts. But there are certain colours that are not photographable. The contrast is pushed for the phone image, which limits colour possibilities. Texture can't be seen either. You have to turn up because these are paintings that demand your presence.