Isolde Kille: Painting • Video • Installation
Norman Douglas
Isolde Kille has
installed her second solo exhibition in the cozy second floor space where Steve
Cannon has maintained his venerable Lower East Side cultural center, Tribes Gallery,
for the past ten years (and where I volunteer). I’ve attended a vast range
of exhibits at Tribes since artist, curator and founder of Tribes’ gallery
component Dora Espinoza’s inaugural show in 1993, when partner Vibeke Jensen
and I experimented with audio-visual memory paradigms as individual electric,
i.e., rigging our Ceci n’est pas un peep show in the closet.
With Kille’s exhibition, it’s refreshing to see an artist make a concerted
effort to integrate her work into the space itself. Ironically, because it is
an actual floor-through apartment – like the homes that are most often the
destination of an art object – Tribes Gallery presents its own, unique set
of challenges to artists, whose motivations often ignore the subjectivity of
space as it exists.
Kille turned to painting in black and white in 1999, around the time she felt
the need to devote herself entirely to the production of art.
Obviously steeped
in the literature that qualifies and validates the history of art, Kille grows
intensely animated when speaking about her work. Like most of us who find ourselves
trying to present theories in our living speech, she is not always successful
at getting her point across. This is as much a result of the complexity of her
inspirations as it is her struggle with English. Kille describes her work with
an endearing shyness, steadily accelerating the pace of her discourse until she
catches herself in mid-concept, frazzled, the way Wile E.
Coyote discovers
he has just run over the edge of another cliff. Fortunately, where words fail
her, Kille’s paintings step in to fill the gap.
Her work is reminiscent
of the early abstract expressionists; her controlled drips and strokes evidence
a gestural affinity for brush and paint, her repeated experiments with the simplicity
of line test the liberating restraints of black and white. Her motivation is
avowedly political, but Kille mostly describes her refined, black and white tableaus
as unpopulated landscape studies. Or studies of depopulated landscapes. Inspired
by the temporal and spatial documentation of the landscape in Ansel Adams’
photography, Kille turned her imagination toward a speculative history: to a
time in the future when humanity has so altered the planet that what remains
is but a vast, level expanse of colorless shadow and swallowed light. Meticulous
about the materials she works with, Kille spent two years subsumed in the disappearance
of the brush stroke. Her exhibit at Tribes features a triptych of this effort,
3 Spaces constructed through 1 horizontal, 1 vertical, and 1 diagonal, which
serves as a point of departure for her other paintings.
By 2001, Kille
sought to distance her abstraction from the referents of Richter and photographer
Sugimoto that viewers often saw in her canvases. Seeking to return the human
to the natural environment evoked in her abstract landscapes, she confronted
the point of separation head-on, addressing the surface itself. Coating her paintings
with a super-high gloss finish effectively situates the objects’ surfaces
within their spatial context; the veneer’s mirror impression stretches the
abstraction, infusing it with a sense of “Reality” (“one of the
few words which mean nothing without quotes,” wrote Nabokov). Reality, of
course, is not what art produces; beyond the fact that the object becomes a real
thing, its image is not what it pretends to. Standing before one of these lustrous
paintings poses a challenge. Most viewers move to the side, the way one moves
one’s fingers to the edge of a photo. Does this behavior indicate the difficulty
with which we gaze at ourselves, or a desire to see the artwork unimpeded by
one’s own reflected image? Kille, of course, is not unaware of this behavior,
and has hung the largest canvas, Stars (oil on linen, 66 x 80 in.), only a couple
of inches from the floor, where it approximates a fitting room mirror.
While classical mythology has generated a universe of mythologies emanating from
the mirror’s surface (or edge) – from Mediterranean antiquity and the
temple-whore allegory of Narcissus to the Babylonian treasure chest outfitted
with a protective mirror inside the lid (the unlucky thief who opens the scrine
to gaze at this surface is transported to the hell beyond) – Kille’s
varnished surfaces fix our reflection in the murky present. If we can place them
anywhere along a trajectory of historic surfaces, we might be drawn to the polished
edges of contemporary ur-realist – or neoplastic – figuration, the
kind of playful embellishment that photorealists from Alberto Vargas to Chuck
Close explore in their own – exceedingly populist – treatment of paint.
But where these men are driven to manipulate our perception of the painting in
relation to photographs, Kille – definitely inspired by photography –
bases her propositions in space. And space, as Henri Lefebvre reminds us in his
book, The Production of Space, is what we are.
