Landscapes of the Mind
The playwright and art critic, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, believed that it was in bad taste for painting to have “two points necessarily separate in time.” But what if the points were happening simultaneously? Depriving time of its relentless chronological progress? In the paintings of Michelle Jezierski, time and space become fractured into multivalent streams. The works flipping between a constant alternating spectrum of instants, moments, and reflections. You see it in the tiles of Bit, (2023) as it sweeps from sky blue to deep crimson then back again. It’s pixelated change refuting any sense of conclusiveness within its regulated, ever-changing space.
Barnet Newman once said that he wanted his paintings to “give (man) a sense of place, that he knows he’s there and gets a sense of himself.” In Jezierski's most recent series, her paintings shift away from any sense of fixed solidity. In the subtle hued, swirling light of Drift, (2023) there’s no way of knowing if the segments are moving into place or ever further out of alignment. Like fault lines disturbing the interior, these gently slanting lines tug and traverse at the composition; splintering the canvas and slicing through its bucolic marking. In much the same way a prism refracts the light, its multiple vistas meditate on the impossibility of there ever being just one single perspective.
Many of the works in this series are disrupted by those dissonant fissures cutting through the canvas, deflecting the linearity, distorting the pictorial space. In Verge, those splits subtly diverge as it moves towards the edge of the canvas, the disparity gently widening and thickening. That deliberate change, however faint (like a visual stutter), disturbs the symmetry of what you are seeing. In her essay, The Contemporary Sublime, Jeni Fulton suggests that these diagonal slants serve as a reminder of the “essential artifice of painting.” A point Jezierski emphasizes with her use of a more systematic, grid-like matrix. In contrast to the refracted panes of earlier work (similar to the framed view of the sky from the windows of her studio), the rigidity of the grids, geometricize the paintings beneath an ever-extending lattice.
Squares are a rare occurrence in nature and their detached austerity bring a striking aesthetic confrontation with her gestural marks. Hover, (2023) appears to almost ripple before you, the interruptions of a warmer light peeking through vivid, murky surges, as it transforms from one state and into another. It is a painting that appears to be transitioning into and then out of itself, cycling between an array of associate memories and the immediate sense of its own materiality. The thin lines of the grid framework, far from being featureless, betray its own alteration (of what it will become or what it once was). Like palimpsests, these crevices, leave barely perceptible traces, hinting at lost impulses occurring just beneath the surface.
This method of painting, building up of layer upon layer, is an act of creation requiring a constant form of erasure and revision. The effect is both cinematic and glitchy, each overlapping layer of paint resonating with its unseen presence. At first those delineating lines appear hard-edged and fixed but up close the paint bleeds into the layer beneath – loose imperfections within a perfect geometric order. Occurring on the delicate boundary between these alterations, this contamination modulates across the painting’s spatial expanses. It is one of a number of geometric elements that continue what the artist calls her “investigations into the different ways of disturbing the space.” A vocabulary of interference, that destabilises the view while highlighting the fragmentary nature of the pictorial.
So much of the work is about concealing and revealing. Contrasting forces, that demonstrate the intrinsic mutability of any given occurrence. Her work is filled with such juxtapositions: gesture and geometry, artificial and natural, interior and exterior, amorphous and rigidity: amplifying tensions that gently constrict and pull at the sensibilities of the canvases. Nibbling away at these seemingly harmonious landscapes to reveal a less discernible but nonetheless palpable unease. As there’s a vulnerability to transition, the inherent uncertainty of its end point. And in their infinitely extending repetition, the square frameworks offer an illusory sense of fixedness across the gestural washes of color. A metaphoric scaffold playing on humankind’s need to find a rationalising, comprehensible order to nature’s unrestrained force.
For she teases the sublime in these works; the cloud-like markings could just as easily be light reflected off the surface of water. The Romantics believed that the sublime was to experience the wonder of creation, when our (exterior) rational mind becomes overwhelmed by the strength of our (interior) emotions. Just as Jezierski’s geometric lines allude to the extremities of the world beyond the canvas, it is from an impulse that emanates from the interior. Float, (2023), with its stratus of heavy purple, captures that inner-outer duality; a feeling of precipitousness, a sense that it (the horizon) is on the cusp of alteration. The emphasis here is less on transition but on the fractional moment before; a time pregnant with precarity and possibility. A landscape of the mind, offering the illusion of fixity before shifting immediately into the new and unseen.