Jessica Gandolf: Some Assembly Required
Jessica Gandolf’s recent body of work, in her solo show Some Assembly Required, at Moss Galleries, presents a luminous kaleidoscope of color, image, and emotion. The work invites the viewer into a world that is both orderly and surprising, filled with beauty in unexpected forms.
Painted with a wonderful grasp of color and an intuitive sense of compositional harmony, the work in Some Assembly Required holds a sense of meaning and intimacy that is anchored in both process and history. “My interests include Renaissance painting, color field painting, pure abstraction, and the grid,” Gandolf says. “The work is an attempt to both reveal and reconcile the apparent incongruities within these disparate elements…My goal is not necessarily to create a coherent whole but to
collect and mobilize the individual parts, searching for strange forms and
unexpected functions.”
Looking at paintings is a multi-layered and continually-changing experience, different for every person who participates as viewer, artist, or both. Paintings can invite us to sink into pattern or confront its dissolution; to perceive narrative or to relinquish it to non- objectivity; to be confronted with flatness, depth, and endless variations on color; all as
we move into the singular world that has been built for us by the artist. Gandolf’s paintings form a layered set of opportunities for engagement on the part of the viewer, highlighting the experience of perception when it is slowed by overlapping elements. Her paintings are both abstract and figurative; spatial and flat; narrative and beautifully formal. We pass through their sections as though through a series of silk curtains, each
silently yielding to the next as we move deeper into her world.
The first threshold we cross is that of color, which takes the form of a radiant, broken grid crossed by colorful and counterintuitive lines. In this way, color and the organization of space become intertwined. Next, we move into the realm of the figure. Frequently male, these figures are not necessarily the ones we have been conditioned to find in paintings; they engage a different kind of vulnerability than images of female figures,
which are more typical subjects of the gaze. These figures transcend a male/female binary, at points, especially when feet (often sourced from art-historical images) become the focus. “Feet,” says Gandolf, “are avatars in these paintings, symbolizing bodies without concern for physicality, individuality, or gender.” They allow us to access
a sense of universality, open a portal to the unexpected, and let beauty be lingered upon outside of normative structures. The feet speak to the holiness of an offering, aligning Gandolf’s work with ancient iconography. The figures and other images she presents are both virtuosically depicted and deeply felt, organized on the picture plane like another modular unit in the grid. Some Assembly Required is a meditation on allowing meaning to rise to the surface of vast complexity.
~ Hilary Irons
