Julie Alpert’s Little Paintings

Julie Alpert has a bunch of mysterious, sweet, mean little paintings hanging in the backspace of Soil this month. I’m specifying that they’re “little” because their size does something to invite you into an intimate world.

They’re also little compared to Alpert’s typically big, space-encompassing site-specific installations.

With both the paintings and the installations, bits of environmental information mate with a chosen aesthetic to offer a narrative that straddles fiction and nonfiction. A window frame might be exaggerated and multiplied, or the bricks of a house might tumble off to bloom in the street. Alpert’s sensibility is both delicate and assertive; or perhaps she’s asserting the intricate delicacies that surround us.

I do feel, looking at these paintings of backyards, that I’m being shown an intensified glimpse of what’s really there. There is wonder in this giant cloaked thing.

There are voyeuristic rewards to be had here, peering into the parts of people’s yards that they think are just for them. Sunlight splashes around shamelessly and trees take on map-like shapes. The compositions are driven by a depth in perspective, and the color is pitch-perfect. We are clearly being invited/seduced into these odd, semi-private spaces with sheds and tarps and backyard detritus. It is more than enough if all we do once we get there is look.

Undeclared Goods

Ilona Hakvoort

It seems that when one is trying to communicate something in a language that isn’t one’s own, the words are pared down to what is absolutely essential.  Crafty banter is left out, and the resulting message is more like a plea or a recipe than an essay.

The very short statement by Dutch artists Ilona Hakvoort, Matthijs Hendriks, and Tanja Isbarn reads this way. It is simple, direct, and necessary to experiencing their show at SOIL the way they’re hoping you will:

“The show Undeclared Goods allows the viewer to see the works in the expanded domain of painting. Ordinarily painting is defined as an image on a flat surface.  The third dimension, however, transforms painting into a total, physical experience.  [The observer is invited] to perceive the whole gallery space as a landscape, which also applies to each individual work.”

I think if I hadn’t read this, I would have directed my attention to the rather modernist art objects and assumed it was some tribute to minimalism. Knowing their intent, though, I let myself fall into the individual “paintings” as though floating in a pool. Each of the paintings, drawings, and resin pieces has the effect of pulling you in and getting you lost, if you let them.

Tanja Isbarn  {This is one drawing in a series that lies in a little cardboard box in the gallery. Visitors are invited to put on white gloves and pick up, handle, and put down each drawing, enabling an elaborate act of looking.}

While Hakvoort, Hendriks and Isbarn value the physical work they’ve made, equally important is the distance between the objects and their viewers. What process connects the two, and what methods are used?  These artists want us to look at their work, and they want us to experience the act of looking at it. It is a complicated, quiet request, and they traveled across oceans and continents (and an active volcano) to make it. I’m grateful for it.

Matthijs Hendriks