NYAB Event - Tess Bilhartz “Purple Nights”

Tess Bilhartz “Purple Nights”

Arts + Leisure

This event has ended.

Two women cruise the high desert looking for enlightenment. Instead they encounter blood and dark energy, time and again finding themselves caught in their own headlights. In Purple Nights, Tess Bilhartz’ serialized account of West Texas misadventure, the painter retraces miles of highway, the same stretches traveled by Sal and Dean, by Thelma and Louise, while keeping the window cracked to the spiritual vortex of the desert night. Done with a self-reflexive awareness of the American road, these paintings flicker between the expected and the unknown like the broken white line slicing the highway in half.

Painted on panels so loaded with gesso that they soak up color like ink in a cheap paperback, or like blood in sand, the paintings composing Purple Nights show different moments in a dreamlike story. Some are close-ups—in which the narrative frame and that of the painting are one and the same—but most are divided into separate moments set apart by thin white borders. These crisp limits tease the viewer with the expectation of chronology, of temporal or narrative resolution. They stand apart from the painterly action they contain, pulling taut the series’ central tension. On one end: the linear narrative of the highway search, how it matches the defined form of the road itself. On the other: all that weird darkness off to the sides, or just beyond the headlights.

Populated by mysterious characters shifting in darkened locales, Purple Nights refracts the teleology of the road trip back on itself, crushes it into windshield crystals scattered on the rumble strips, diffuses it wide in a blinding lens flare. Things aren’t as they seem. POVs shift from the subconscious to the cinematic. Everything is flush with cantina-light, the type that darkens the closer you get to dawn, to what you’re looking for.