Petra Cortright “ultra angel wing absolute”

Foxy Production

[Image: Petra Cortright "WRITING PRIVATE EYE_SWINGERS suplemento alimentario+ong+espaÒa_striptease previews" (2021) digital painting on Belgian linen, 33 x 33 in.]

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Foxy Production “ultra angel wing absolute,” Petra Cortright’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. “absolute” is a perfumer’s term for a fragrance at its highest concentration, at its most potent. Cortright sees her works as distillations of the images circulating around her, whether from the real world or the internet. Her new series of digital paintings use Angel Wing Clematis, a white narrow-petalled climbing-vine flower—thought to symbolize knowledge and aspiration—as its central motif.

Cortright depicts fragmented and reconnected still lifes and landscapes: floral arrangements appear to be inside a darkened studio, near a window, in a garden, or by a lake. The artist’s suggestions of place are complicated by their references to the process of painting—by their brushstrokes, lines, smudges, drips, and textured surfaces—by their active, abstracted backgrounds, and by their multiple-perspectives and vantage points.

The artist combines a number of themes from art history—from Vanitas painting to Modernist landscape and Abstract Expressionism—within canvases that have an animated vivacity all their own. Her works’ interconnections of genre, subject, mark-making, and color produce a visual flow, where figure, ground, and dimension appear to be in flux.

The artist’s canvasses are a mix of original and copy: some elements—flowers, leaves, and branches—are photographed in the artist’s garden, while others, including marks, lines, and brushstrokes, are painted in Photoshop or appropriated from the internet. Configurations of objects, forms, and colors reappear in different permutations and combinations across the exhibition, giving the works a serial quality that suggest cels from an animation or the products of a generative software; yet, though the artist’s studio and tools may be embodied in her computer, her hand is always present. Her paintings can be seen as maps or traces of her actions in front of the screen. They read like bursts of imagination and performance that have somehow fissured out from the mantle of an increasingly homogenized and corporatized world.

Petra Cortright’s considerable body of work is central to the canon of internet and digital art. She became renowned initially for making performance-based self-portrait videos that use her computer’s webcam and default effects tools, which she would then upload to YouTube and caption with spam text. Her practice has expanded to the composition of dynamic digital files distributed across a range of media, including multi-channel installations and paintings on aluminum, linen, or paper.