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The work of these two artists shares the sense of a presence that is conjured, as if arising from the paint itself. The results interweave hilarity with horror, the mysterious and the absurd.
In Barbara Friedman‘s ongoing series of paintings, “The Hysterical Sublime,” figures and creatures seem to coalesce out of an abstract, prismatic primordial soup. Friedman’s process begins with washes of oil paint spilled or poured onto oil-primed linen, color flowing into color, until imagery begins to suggest itself. Figurative elements are then coaxed out of this painterly effluvium. In Friedman’s words, “I’m making paintings that are fundamentally abstract that nibble around the edges of figuration.” And “nibbling” is apropos: creatures, mouths, eyes, and body parts emerge, suggesting an animate phantasm, or perhaps the id incarnate.
Friedman’s imagery evokes the pre-verbal, the primordial, the hidden. “They can be grotesque and scary but I want them to be cuddly in a way — sometimes they are licking or sucking or kissing. Especially during Covid it was all the things we wanted to do – not necessarily sexual, but bodily contact.” She notes that pandemics move across species, heightening both the fear and desire that we humans project onto wild animals.
The way Friedman brings imagery out of the murk – its “surfacing” – hints at a psychological undercurrent, the constant thrum of repressed anxiety, both individual and collective – but the paintings also contain a wild humor. “The unknowable doesn’t reside in the abstraction, it’s in the combination, it’s parts, it’s hints, a glimmer of something.” In this world, there’s space for the viewer to complete the picture.
In the work of Tess Jenkins, oil stick is combined with other materials, gradually accreting over time into thick layers until a form begins to emerge. Paint stick is applied wet-into-wet, the color mixed directly on the canvas. Using the dual nature of this material as a graphic drawing tool that also possesses a dense physicality, Jenkins pushes the medium via a process of mashing, grinding, building up and scraping away. Glitter is mixed in with the paint, loading it further, adding body and grit. In the areas where it glints through or lies on top of the paint, it exerts a flickering, dazzling opticality.
Jenkins works on over 50 paintings at once, sometimes taking years to complete a given piece. “There’s a really long, labored process that feels like an excavation, a searching, a Frankenstein-like situation where I’m slowly trying to build up a charge until it feels like there’s something there.” That something -- a sense of the animate, the electric, a presence sparking to life -- is further underscored by the spectral shimmer of the glitter. The phenomenological nature of this material adds an interactive quality to the work as it is positionally activated by the viewer. “There’s something about the glitter, how it reacts to light as you’re moving around it, and its glinting -- it’s an active presence.”
