Vista Blitz

Melanie Authier’s recent paintings function on two wavelengths. They engage painting as an abstract two-dimensional construct, and they also describe vast space. On the other hand, her paintings emphasize the surface of the canvas with sharply defined shape, gestured paint and layered glazes that acknowledge and reinforce its haptic presence. On the other hand, there are contortions of coalescing form, atmospheric gullies, and unmeasurable dips and sweeps that fall away from the participating viewer into deep space - heightening the experience of illusionistic space. This twinned manner of making a painting is deftly, imperceptibly woven together in Authier’s painting process. A variety of her own vocabularies - some of which vaguely reference art historical moments (where biomorphic abstraction meets Futurism, meets Abstract Expressionism, meets the Romantic panorama, to name a few) are utilized in such a way that refers to the type of space often found in landscapes. Loosened from their source, (be it painting’s history or the natural world) the pictorial elements are supercharged into being.

Authier’s forms relate to their context and situation in ways that are unrepeatable from painting to painting. A mark within her visual sampling exists much like a word that cannot be accurately defined, a word whose meaning must be considered in the context of a sentence, the paragraph it is situated within, the speaker, and the moment in time is uttered. The artist’s goal is to push a painting through increasingly unanticipated improvisations within her lexicon. Each painting is a mash-up, a composite of opposites that compete for room within the canvas, a perpetual play between chaos and control, the organic and the synthetic, flatness and depth, the atmospheric and the geologic. A sense of disorientation comes about through the way in which shape, line, form and gesture announce themselves and contextualize themselves against their neighbors. For the artist, the process of a painting occurs as a series of contrasts, each mark attempting to usurp the prominence of the previous idea. The result is a painting that behaves much like a chameleon’s skin. Two functions simultaneously occur in one form: a shape can appear as a surface with depth, and a shard from a hard edge can bend into a pocket of recessive space into the distance. The various zones, whether they move toward or away from us, are layered one on top of another, creating moments of extreme remoteness and improbable proximity. This instability between the haptic and the optic creates an experience that is as sumptuous as it is unnerving, a jolt into the uncanny where the aesthetic verges into the grotesque, and back again.


- Martin Golland, 2008