Esther Solondz : Mud, Rust, and Hummingbird Nectar

Paul Rahilly: Figure Painting

January 4 — January 26 at Gallery NAGA

The new year begins with two quite distinct artists, both of whose works are fundamentally ruminations on the human body.  Esther Solondz conjures, with a variety of unorthodox materials, “portraits” of girls and women who are largely of her invention.  Paul Rahilly paints, typically from models, figures in imagined landscapes.  For both, questions about the nature of reality – the relationships between art images and “ordinary” life – dominate discussion of their work.

Esther Solondz: Mud, Rust, and Hummingbird Nectar and Paul Rahilly: Figure Paintings both run from January 4 through 26.  A reception for the artists and the public will be held on Friday, January 4 from 6 to 8 p.m.

The continuing evolution of Esther Solondz’s fascination with and experimentation with materials that transform is expressed in her new work.  For the past six years, she’s worked with substances that, over time, turn themselves into something else – dripping salt water that forms stalagmites, iron filings that rust to leave a suggestive half-here, half-there image.

For the past year, Solondz has been bringing faces into being using such processes as mud drying on fabric that leaves an impression on the sheet of paper beneath.  “I’ve spent the last year and a half trying to recapture or grasp something,” Solondz says. “What I’m hunting after are images the process creates.  I make one image and then the process makes another, with consequences I can’t predict or control.”  It’s evident that Solondz is captivated by the experience of setting in motion a process whose dynamic takes her images to another plane of development.

Working this past summer in New Hampshire, Solondz was surprised by a hummingbird fluttering into her open-ended studio.  She rigged a feeding station above mud portraits and let the bird add highlights to the work, dripping in daubs of nectar.

Who are these people Solondz and her processes present?  They’re both young and old; some have a contemporary look, others feel as if they’re peering out of the past.  “I’m looking for a face that’s real but doesn’t seem to be on this plane of existence,” Solondz offers.  Her studio – and her mental storehouse of images – houses a collection of vintage photographic portraits.  “I take a lot of liberties. I’ll invent the light situation or the hair, or I’ll put images together.  Sometimes I’ll just invent.”  The faces that result exist in a netherworld of imagination, and the look of the materials suggests evanescence.  They have a tangential relationship to what we usually think of as the ordinary plane of life.

Paul Rahilly has been lionized by painters in this region for decades.  An influential teacher, here and there at major art schools in Boston and also privately, often at night, he reserves his days largely for his own work, which since 2001 has been shown in New York by Hirschl & Adler Modern.

Rahilly is often called a realist, but the term doesn’t fit well for a few reasons.  The figures typically at the center of his large works, female nudes or livestock or both, are generally set in situations so odd or fantastic – beneath towered castles, under absurdly gnarled trees, picnicking beside a mausoleum – that their world is more aptly termed surrealist, or fabulist.

In terms of pictorial execution, Rahilly loves few things more than blurring the edges between one thing and its neighbor, so that it’s impossible to see the boundary between, for example, a leg and a tree trunk or a duck’s wing and the plastic gas can behind it.  So what he’s doing, at bottom is painting, and the images are no more important or meaningful in his work than the lines or the color or the clusters and swoops of delectably fluid paint. It’s the visually provocative surface he’s after, not the narrative, and in a sense, that’s more abstract than it is realist.  As Rahilly has famously remarked, commenting on the tendency to overstate the role of image in painting, “No one goes to opera for the plot.”