Bursts, Atmosphere and Stasis catalog essay
Kylie Heidenheimer, Bursts, Atmosphere and Stasis exhibition, Ohio Northern University, Ada, Ohio, 2008; The Italian Academy at Columbia University, NYC, 2007
Lost and Found in Space
The stretched canvas is a paradox, delineating the expansiveness of boundless space. Its edges circumscribe an imaginative frontier. It intensifies the illusion of infinitude by marking it off, by framing and containing it. Once and for all, it fixes the evanescent.
The artificially, arbitrarily enclosed expanse of space as a microcosm of experience is analogous to the garden, the corral, the kitchen, the petri dish, the snow globe, standup comedy, lunar modules, novels, and pictures.
Painters feel their way forward into charged but uncharted pictorial space. Or they just barge right in, unannounced. The first thing the viewer notices about Kylie Heidenheimer’s work is how carefully considered her decisions are. Each brush stroke, splash, drip or puddle--even those that seem spontaneous--are survivors of the artist’s editorial eye. Every feature of her paintings has to earn its pictorial worth. A brush is the ideal tool to facilitate access to the space of the painting's support, transporting and releasing pigment with a minimum of biomechanical effort and reducing the lag time between the impulse and its expression. For a few years, Heidenheimer forsook the brush for other means. In paintings such as Glade and Solid As Ether she obviates her touch by means of sponges, pools and pours, courting the chance occurrence, the happy accident. Drips sit aloft, nuggets of color adrift on washing waves. Surfers talk about “the green room,” that static, organic space within the cresting wave’s onrushing tube. Painters know a certain clotted crawl space, similarly exhilarating to attempt and monumentally indifferent to individual failure. Confronting that tradition has been a vital chapter in Heidenheimer’s search for a distinctive and dramatic choreography of surface and trace.
In essence, painting transforms goop--whether pigmented oil, tinted acrylic polymer, or some other malleable substance possessing evocative chroma, that will adhere for a substantial period of time to a vertical surface--into pictorial experience. The only other prerequisite is the viewer’s willingness to allow that, in certain circumstances and in the right hands, that goop can get to something grand, can reward scrutiny by engaging the eye and transporting the imagination. This exquisite anomaly underlies Heidenheimer’s simultaneously concrete and ephemeral paintings. The self-evident materials don’t quickly translate into pictorial meaning but cling to the meaning of their materiality. Irrefutably present, they somehow contain the psychic weight of absence, make the painting look as if something is going on outside its frame or underneath its skin that informs its appearance, but the exact nature of which remains unknown.
Despite the subdued, black/white/gray palette of works like Lights and Cape, such pictures testify to the artist’s mastery of fundamental painterly devices: washes underlying body color, warm and cool tonalities, scampering and slithering mark making, shadow versus sheen. Then there is the crepuscular, mysterious Mead, the most object-like of the major recent canvases. In its shallow, tactile space, we might be inspecting the streaming wall of a cave. Here the artist’s taste for the square format makes inarguable visual sense. There is no suggestion of lateral movement, only the stasis of entrapment and pressure.
Raceway does this too, complicating the familiar sensation of a receding, distinctly watery plane, approximated by lazily horizontal strokes, with a hail of manganese blue. Frank Stella once remarked that the Abstract Expressionists “got into trouble at the corners,” by which he meant to indicate the faultless logic of his own designs. But the corners of Raceway define its program: earth, ocean, vapor, shell. Within them is glorious confusion.
This exhibition heralds an unexpectedly new beginning for the artist, as here we have before us a radiant new triptych called Lucky Stripes. Nothing heretofore has prepared us for its finesse, its jittery shimmer, its distinctly aquatic matrix of calligraphic marks, its rainbow-hued smoke on the water. A strong, hot orange and a high, clear blue mark its chromatic extremes, with dry-brush red and staining white lightly strewn about in a manner that yields an atmospheric haze that the artist half-jokingly refers to as “fast space.” As does Heidenheimer’s earlier work, Lucky Stripes willfully conflates the veiling and the veiled. But here the veil of the stretched canvas itself is brought into the conversation by means of canvas-colored paint that fuses figure and ground, skin and support.
For most of the twenty-five years she has painted in New York, Heidenheimer has worked a vein that has been in art-world fashion’s dustbin. Gestural abstraction was spurned by received wisdom, which let only a few feisty talents through its filter of taste: Joan Snyder, Louise Fishman, Pat Steir, Pat Passlof. The recent, overdue mainstream recognition of the achievement of Joan Mitchell has helped to prompt a greater receptiveness to this venerable, irony-free idiom. Intuition was a dirty word until a few years ago. Kylie Heidenheimer’s painting belongs to a lineage of open-ended, utopian abstraction guided by faith in the integrity of intuition. Pictorial fact is implied rather than stated, tapping into the part of the viewer’s brain engaged with becoming rather than being. The opposite of illustration, her work pursues the phantom image.
--Stephen Maine