SKY GLITCHES
You think you’re looking at something—having a fresh experience—and then you find yourself already remembering it. This little glitch between experience and reflection, impression and thought is what Michelle Jezierski captures in the cuts that structure and divide her paintings. What seem to be paintings of skies—clouds and light—without reference to a ground or a horizon, contain the possibility of being entirely abstract. Like how, in a memory, feeling can become divorced from place, or smell can belong to something other than its source, Jezierski’s skies untether from representation, only to reattach themselves through these glitches in the last instance. In a 2017 interview, Jezierski explained how she uses landscape as her starting point. “As soon as you have a horizon,” she said, “you have a landscape. Then I reduce the images.” What is abstracted through this process of reduction, it seems, are not the skies and the clouds, which remain more or less intact, but the slither of horizon itself. In the end, hers are alternate, mostly vertical, horizon lines that make landscapes, not as we see them, but as they settle in our minds.
I once read the fall of the Berlin Wall described as “the day when two gray skies became one.” But this, a joke on the notoriously monochrome sky over the German capital, is not true for at least two reasons. First, a sky cannot really be split, and so cannot be joined. But also the sky is never, ever the same. I didn’t understand this until I watched the sky appear from darkness over the bay, every morning, from a house on the coast of Denmark. Even on the darkest days it was always broken by light, if only for a moment. Some days it was gruesome, a single sharp tear of bright orange through a black cloud on the horizon; and others gentle and soft, a silvery gray oneness with water, washing over everything. Jezierski’s paintings are my aid as I describe these past skies, of course already long receded from my memory.
Later the same year, I visited a friend in a Neapolitan suburb at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, close to Pompeii. Weirdly, the bay of Naples looked the same as the view from the house in Denmark: glimmering lights to the left, and far out ahead, the silhouette of an island—whether Capri or Samsø turned out to matter little. I thought of my Danish relatives in front of the fire, as if the seasons hadn’t changed and they were still there, watching an ever-changing fallout of the same sky, and saw in that sameness the prolonging of life as the extension of an experience, a layering of time itself. You think you’re looking at something, but then you find yourself remembering it. You find that the sky is not new, but is it also never the same, or even in the same place.
Jezierski’s paintings evoke a similar feeling of watching the sky appear again and again and all at once, like two bays at either end of the continent, simultaneous spaces framed inside the same view. We see depictions of light and color interrupted by invisible boundaries, cut up like a film reel, or as if by the edge of a mirror; divided, and then again, not. Like the sky, her paintings are both never and always the same—the same as each other, as themselves; to different people, and at different times. A painting such as Tip, 2020, is naturally both stormy and tranquil. For a moment, we might think that the cuts are what stage this ambivalence, but actually each band is as rosy pale as it is ominously dark—the cuts do not separate these shifts in mood, but rather structure ambivalence in a way that allows us to perceive it. Then comes the motif: Amidst the clouds we might see the pinnacle of a mountain, shrouded in fog, something which, once seen, cannot be unseen. But again, the interruptions—growing more and more nebulous as you keep looking at the painting—are both what makes the mountain appear, and what, very quickly afterward, asks us to question what we think we saw: Is it not rather smoke, or a shadow, or a stain? This mountain, then, is not a figure of the artist’s intention, but more than anything, a confrontation with the complex nature of perception.
Maurice Blanchot wrote that “to see is to apprehend immediately from a distance.” In art, humans use technique or technology to produce distance, and it is this distance that enables us to apprehend immediacy, now-ness; what we would otherwise be too immersed in to be able to see. These lines that run through and across Jezierski’s canvases are like scaffolds for seeing; false divisions that make difference appear amidst sameness. In Blur, 2018, the sharply contrasted stripes that dominate the picture facilitate the sigh of relief, the rush of forgiveness of an uninterrupted swathe of mint green in the lower left corner, and the slightly angry, stubborn assertion of the dark blue strokes that cut across. The title of Between the Lines, 2019, hones in on a question that is central to all of Jezierski’s work: Are we reading the colors or the divisions? To emphasize the complexity of that question, I’ll ask it a different way: What makes us able to understand speech? The words or the pauses between them? In the case of that particular painting, I’d say that the lines make me see more lines where there are none, but I am not sure that qualifies as an answer.
If, with these scaffolds for seeing, these dividing lines, Jezierski has developed a subtle language for talking about the most enormous, perhaps most shifty thing of all—the atmosphere as it unfolds above us—what is she telling us about it? Here we must remember that language shares with the sky a slippery and vertiginous nature. Words, because they must apply equally to every iteration of their referent, are hollow, and the sound of a word will always be full of all the other times you heard it. I look at a picture like Refract, 2021, and that is what I see—all the other skies at different times and different places; the unruliness of language, miraculously contained.
This idea is neatly illustrated in Lydia Davis’s 2004 novel The End of the Story. There, the narrator sets out to reconstruct as literature a relationship she had with a man fifteen years before. Although she looked for him, she never saw him again and so none of the time they spent together has been brought into the present on that stream of continuity by which people and experiences continue to belong to us and are integrated into our lives. This results in the narrative of the love affair being interrupted by the author’s own process of recollection. She thinks she’s writing a story about the past, but finds herself describing the present. It is a description of how memory and language approximate each other asymptotically, coming nearer but never touching.
In Davis’s novel, the love story and the meta-narrative are separated by paragraph breaks and the occasional asterisk. But there is no difference between the distances marked by an empty space and those marked by a small star—the cuts are neither more nor less severe. Rather, you read closely and find that the two temporalities are just as illogical and full of holes.
This is where the novel’s structure so resembles Jezierski’s paintings. A paragraph break is that line slicing up the sky, that intake of breath. But watch closely and see the line disintegrate in splashes of color and flights of light. What’s left is a kind of intense present, full to the brim of before and after, of uncertainty and loss. (It is no coincidence that Davis is the translator of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time). This also means that neither Jezierski’s paintings nor Davis’s novel are “about” what they say they are about: not the past, but how we recollect it; not love but what it leaves us with; not the sky but the way we perceive it in relation to other things. When Jezierski begins from the landscape rather than ends there, it is because the landscape is a lie. It suggests things about scale, distance, and space that are not true. Loop, 2020, could seem like a zoomed-in crop of One, 2021, though the latter is half the size. (The book format exacerbates this problem: representation, language, lies). Blush, 2019, not a sky but a sensation, might very well form part of a mountain or a cloud or a wave, but up close. Their referencing system is not stable, but wide open.
This echoes through The End of the Story, where Davis’s narrator finds both her past and her narrative full of flaws, missing names and misplaced feelings. She looks at love from both sides; Jezierski looks at clouds. But as in Joni Mitchell’s famous song, both are left none the wiser, and that is the whole point. In Davis, the narrator’s grip slips, as the clouds on Jezierski’s canvases glitch, and it is in that slight drop that both story and the sky appear most powerfully.