NYAB Event - Emma Tapley "Being Time: Inversions"

Emma Tapley "Being Time: Inversions"

Fischbach Gallery

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In these latest paintings Tapley further develops her examination of pictorial representation though the contrasts of transparency and material reflection and nontraditional points of view. Tapley has long had a painter’s fascination with water, but in her case it is not one of churning seas such as with Winslow Homer or water-views with man-made structures beside them as with Gerhard Richter, but of stillness, of water as mirror, of water pooled in small, seemingly forgotten corners of a lake, a pond or an old, slow-moving river. It is the world, natural and not man-made, above or around these reflective surfaces that has captured her eye – the tree whose leaves fall to float atop the inky water, the mist that erases the distinctions between air and land and water, the reflection of a blue sky that colors the water’s surface – it is this oddly quiet, inverted world to which Tapley has turned her attention. Analogous to the situation of Plato’s cave, the viewer is seeing, by means of the water’s surface, only a reflection of the “reality” that it is representing. Tapley’s paintings subtly “comment” on a reality the viewer can only surmise, while being simply what they are: a reflection of a reflection done in oil on panel.

The water surfaces in Tapley’s latest paintings are curiously glassy – there seems to be no breeze, no invisible current, no splashing bird or pivoting water-bug to break the water’s mirroring surface, one that Narcissus would surely drown in. This stillness gives her paintings a timelessness, as if everything were frozen – and what, after all, is time but movement, energy running itself out. And yet the viewer cannot forget time, which Tapley has quietly but carefully evoked in the leaves yellowing on branches, or adrift on the water, or rotting underneath the transparent flow.

Painterly, austere without photographic aloofness, suggestive and sometimes even moody, yet asserting no ironic or complacent judgment, these new paintings by Tapley manifest detailed observations of nature reworked and, through the artist’s sensibility, transformed.