On Ilchi’s surfaces, violent abstraction and delicate illumination jockey for significance. Her completely hyphenated work take the type of surreal landscapes. The celebs in her skies peek by arabesque ornamentation. The mountains on her horizons rise over luminous veils.
“We Are Without end Folding Into the Evening,” Ilchi’s newest solo present at Hemphill Superb Arts — her fourth with the gallery — finds the artist tending to this balancing act as rigorously as ever. Comprising almost two dozen works, most of them acrylic on panel or Mylar, the present is her most expansive but. It additionally marks a interval of transition for the artist. A type of painters is profitable out.
“Solely This Was Actual, as Massive and Entire as Respiratory” is typical for her new work: a sky of ominous ochers and volcanic violets over a panorama of naked branches and rolling rocks. Framing this scene is a fragmented display of ornamentation rendered in cerulean blue, an elemental counterpoint. Ilchi’s double strategy to textures presents even sharper distinction. Ilchi’s ornament is easy and legible, utilized as painstakingly as if she have been illuminating a manuscript. Then again, her abstraction is abrasive, the floor pockmarked and eroded, steel as hell.
A sequence of seven work known as “Hid, Veiled, Eclipsed” traces the motion of solar and moon by a twilight sky, like scenes from a fairy story. The dusty gold of Ilchi’s illumination for these items may very well be mistaken for the gleam of sundown by the clouds. These are essentially the most harmonious works on view, the gentlest by way of the floor battle between Ilchi’s two sides.
Among the works are so balanced, so soothing, in reality, that they give the impression of being resolved. “We Are Without end Folding Into the Evening” doesn’t function any works during which, say, illumination makes up many of the piece — with only a trace of abstraction to throw the entire floor in query. (I’d prefer to see that.) Or a portray that appears totally corroded, one in all her many mark-making methods. A lot of the works observe the identical primary composition, not simply balanced however calibrated. The danger for work so wealthy and lyrical is that they wind up trying rehearsed.
So it helps that at the very least one portray on view is downright tough. “This Time Merciful Nature Saved Us From Ourselves” stands out within the present, and never only for its measurement: 70 inches tall by 110 inches extensive. The piece is a triptych that depicts three views of a panorama that may very well be a cave or a mountain vary. Fringes of Ilchi’s signature illumination creep into view from the tops of the openings depicted on her canvases, suggesting a well-known blurring of realities.
“This Time,” nevertheless, introduces a brand new factor to Ilchi’s method that marks a pivot in her work. Haloed kinds throw the composition into chaos. These filigreed paisleys is perhaps comets crashing to the earth from the heavens or spermatozoa surveying the craggy floor of an ovum. And even branches breaking by from the opposite facet of the portray, puncturing the skinny barrier between realms.
With a single tree that frames the scene and celestial our bodies that throb within the sky — amid a swirl of poisonous inexperienced, oxidized copper and rusted orange — “This Time” appears to gesture towards painters as assorted as Helen Frankenthaler, Clyfford Nonetheless, Hilma af Klint and Vincent van Gogh. It’s exhausting to know what Ilchi is doing along with her starry night time: As a substitute of twin types coexisting in concord, Ilchi’s twin painter selves are dueling it out over the floor.
Whichever one wins, the viewer takes the prize. As a painter, Ilchi stands shoulder to shoulder with different Washington luminaries who use abrasive or corrosive textures for his or her surfaces, specifically Maggie Michael and Robin Rose. Ilchi may make a whole profession from the loud-soft dynamics of hazy ornamental lullabies comparable to “Borrowed Time, Borrowed World and Borrowed Eyes With Which to Sorrow It,” which options an illuminated arched doorway, an alluring type that she’s used previously. However what’s most attention-grabbing about this portray is an acidic mixture of watercolor and acrylic that appears like encaustic wax — a grating, violent departure from her personal custom, like suggestions noise from an amp. There’s portray the doorway, after which there’s strolling by it.
Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi: We Are Without end Folding Into the Evening
Hemphill Superb Arts, 434 Ok St. NW. 202-234-5601. hemphillfinearts.com.
