NYAB Event - Margaret Evangeline "As-If"

Margaret Evangeline "As-If"

Kim Foster Gallery

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Kim Foster Gallery presents As-If -- recent oil paintings and bullet–ridden mirror polished stainless steel panels by Margaret Evangeline. As-If is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The artist is having a concurrent exhibition of recent oil paintings and shotgun paintings entitled Timebomb at Stux Gallery.

Margaret Evangeline’s oil paintings, with their baroque linear structures and suggestive visual glossolalia in the form of sputtering, skidding, and gnarly mark-making embodies her vision as grand bricolage while giving voice to complex and contradictory emotional truths, partially revealed and partially submerged. The artist’s insistent rough-hewn, ramshackle and sinewy expressionist tendencies (with their transcriptional/overlays, echoes of Brice Marden, Joan Mitchell, and Philip Guston) also carries with them delicate yet theatrical visual notes indicating a picking through the scatterings of history a la Cy Twombly and a recall of naturalistic webs as envisioned in the early work of Terry Winters. The artist’s mashup/ make-do/ make-over/ make-it-up vision is one of bricolage inferring multiple transit and transition points through an expression of discursive motility.

Evangeline’s 2011 As-If works are characterized primarily by their extraordinary qualities of fungibility, mutability. Marks indicative of attempted (and often failed) recapitulation and reconnoitering play important roles in the new works. Her paintings Timebomb 2, The Grass is Always Greener, Lights On and Cry Baby, for example, depict interconnective elements and recursive spatial involutions that appear subject to breakup, breakdown and disappearance. In addition the artist’s use of color and variable handling of paint from rough to smooth, from semi-translucent to shimmering opaqueness can be described as sensually unpredictable.

The As-If work at Kim Foster Gallery takes into account the world of “make-believe” and explores its dynamics as a placeholder and initiator of memory. Evangeline’s new paintings points to the “as if” condition of mind that allows a release of creative drives as an imaginative indwelling in “subjunctive space.”

David Summers in his far-ranging text “Real Metaphor: Towards a Redefinition of the ‘Conceptual’ Image” indicates that subjunctive space is a space of loss and renewal. It is a “real” space that is constituative of desire and that uses substitution to come to terms with absence.

Margaret Evangeline’s painterly manifestations apply digressionary space or adjacencies to the visual entities that attempt to congregate at the center of many of the artist’s recent works. The characteristics of Evangeline’s visual metaphoric spacings (with their inferences of interiorized and exteriorized conditions) are their deeply felt psychological ambivalences and polyvalences. Evangeline’s overall vision is one that tends towards open-endedness and endless transpositions as well as sensual and gutteral mark-making all at the service of revealing psychic astringency.