ALISON BLICKLE
Zabriskie Point
October 15 - November 14, 2010
Thierry Goldberg Projects
is proud to present Zabriskie Point, new work by
ALISON BLICKLE. Inspired by the aesthetic of
the desert scenes in Michaelangelo Antonioni's film, in which
a couple drive into Death Valley and have a mystical
experience, the paintings depict solitary females, nude or
partially clothed, in semi-lush, semi-desiccated landscapes.
Blickle's own trip into the California Desert to see Zabriskie
Point last year furthered her fascination for wild
unadulterated environments, leading her to make this sequence
of images, which explores the human longing for union with
nature, and questions the possibility of the desire for
transcendence.
In Augurs, a figure sits upright
with her back to viewers, calling to mind Wanderer Above
the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich. Yet while there
exists in Blickle's work a romantic belief in that
"all-embracing and deeply fulfilling world" of natural beauty,
as she herself says, the paintings also challenge that very
belief. The brushwork creates a texture in the paint that both
dazzles, and at the same time insists on its own flatness. The
landscapes are seductive in their vividness, but also
suspiciously opulent and psychedelic, if not unnatural.
Viewers, like the figures in the paintings, are continually
confronting the limits of their experience with these images
of nature, hitting up against the possibility of escaping into
an unspoiled wilderness. The artist's portrayal of the
individual's encounter with nature is thus no longer
straightforward and harmonious, but rather, tinged with
self-consciousness and irony.
In many of the paintings, the land is
transfused with an extreme brightness, pivoting between the
harshly stark and the magically radiant. When it is not an
overabundance of light that renders the scene ambiguous, it is
sunset colors, like, for instance, in Ascribed to
Signs, where the pigments call to mind the alluring
Californian landscape, while teetering on the edge of the
fantastical. A sun, absent from the sky, appears as a
reflection on the sea, abnormally bright, while pinkish
scratches and abstract forms resembling stairs appear on the
canvas, giving the scene a surreal quality. Once more, these
details gesture toward an environment that, like the figures
that dwell in them, is difficult to determine, at once
alienating and alluring, real and unreal.
In Wish you were Here, a lithe
woman with long limbs in a white bathing suit stands upright,
fore-grounded by a bed of flowers. The softness of the
figure's contours and the smoothness of the brushwork bring
painters like John Currin to mind. While the opulence of the
colors and the simplicity of the rendering border on parody,
the sky, as in Blickle's other paintings, is complicated with
diamond-like formations. A feeling of tension is created
between the realistic, the representational, and the abstract.
As a result, the paintings exist somewhere between the
fanciful, the facetious, and the meaningful.
And so, while the paintings portray the
desert as a place where one can "be free, to explore and
experiment, and to be completely removed from the confines and
rules of society," as the artist remarks, this very locus and
symbol of freedom becomes something that risks being secluded
to the realm of the imaginary. One is left to wonder whether
the desire for a genuine and sustainable connection with the
natural world is just another pipe dream?
Alison Blickle was born in
San Diego, California, in 1976 and currently lives and works
in Los Angeles. She holds an MFA from Hunter College and a BFA
from California College of the Arts. She has exhibited at
Deitch Projects, New York; Richard Heller, Los Angeles; Kinz
Tillou & Feigen, New York; Adobe Books, San Francisco; and
Parlour, New York. Zabriskie Point will be her first solo
exhibition in New York.
Image:
ALISON BLICKLE
The Lesson, 2010
oil on canvas
40×30in.
Courtesy of Thierry Goldberg Project, New York
THIERRY GOLDBERG PROJECTS
5 Rvington Street
New York, NY 10002
T +1 212.967.2260
