Sophie Wahlquist: Lace of Love and Bones

One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. 

I have been one acquainted with the night.

— Robert Frost, “Acquainted with the Night”

Baert Gallery is pleased to present Lace of Love and Bones, an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Sophie Wahlquist. In her first solo show at the gallery, Wahlquist combines two strains of her multi-disciplinary practice, intermixing large-scale painted canvases with illuminated ceramic columns. For this exhibition, the artist has turned to subjects of intimate importance, family members, friends, and concerns of one’s psychic and spiritual life.

As a German transplant to Los Angeles, Wahlquist’s work combines the dueling sensibilities of a historically rich European lineage of figuration in painting and California’s sun-drenched prism of the natural world. The new pieces on view continue the artist’s inquiry into the ability to understand and relate to other people especially one’s own roots. Fruit of Fruits depicts Wahlquist’s near-100-year-old Austrian grandmother on her hospital bed. Executed in soft pastel on raw, unprimed canvas with the artist’s signature technique, the piece’s velvety, tactile surface suggests human skin’s open porosity, conveying a similarly ungraspable ebbing away of historical memory, of personality, and of generational connection, within a life coming to a close. This simultaneously unflinching, almost coldly objective, yet tenderly soft view of the world carries on to the artist’s rendering of her other grandmother in M.A., where the recollection of trying to connect to the loved one’s dementia-ravaged memory with the aid of old family albums inspired the piece’s inventive composition and intimate focus.

In M.A. Resting, another portrait of her grandmother’s last days is bathed in delicate watery shades of fuchsia, juniper, and sea-foam green. Captured prone on a bed, she is accompanied by a string of jagged pearls deliberately rendered sharp and angular, like a line-up of menacing dentures–the material accouterments that survive us, just as the teeth inside one’s mouth would live on, indifferent, long after the flesh had rotted away.

This engagement with the art historical canon’s archetype of the memento mori, or meditation on mortality, and Wahlquist’s distinct knack for injecting historical stylistic tropes with the subjects and views that are intimate, carries over to Alina, subtitled simply attendre (wait).  This work makes use of all the key elements of the classical vanitas in depicting the artist’s friend Alina blowing a soap bubble inside a domed, ecclesiastical setting whose richly expressive wash of Persian blue oil paint is punctuated by a smoking cigarette butt as a reminder of time’s passing.

Crush depicts a painting of a young man by Elizabeth Peyton that Wahlquist fell in love with a long time ago. The work is not an appropriation in a traditional understanding, nor does it attempt to represent the specific subject of the original piece, but is rather a portrait of a portrait–a projection of a particular moment.

Sweetmeats is a canvas collage of a busy party scene. Structured as a patchwork of overlapping textures, lines, and sumptuously rich coloration, this work plays with a crowded tactility of fabric reminiscent of corporeal proximity at a public gathering, with the variety of stitching, gestures, and an easter egg of a minute embedded shoe button communicating the visceral memory of sensorial overstimulation. Here, Wahlquist has employed the method of cutting pieces out of certain paintings and reapplying them to other canvases, intermixing their themes and stories in allusion to symbiotic systems in natural cycles of movement and transformation. Hidden in the work’s corner are a cat with glowing eyes and a hesitant bird who seem to be weighing their power and opportunities–not dissimilar to the social dance performed by the party’s attendees. Animals are a recurring motif in Wahlquist’s paintings: “they are like distant relatives”, she observes, and they enter the picture to provide clues to multiple hidden dynamics. Animal subjects here broaden the spectrum of the human experience ostensibly disconnected from the natural world, creating an effect opposite to the dull eyes of a zoo animal who is separated from other species and can no longer fully embody neither danger nor wonder.

Life Sized Egg is a miniature drawing of a red-dyed egg being approached by a spoon whose center reflects the artist’s own face, all executed in pencil and watercolor on an old lacy cotton napkin. The egg appears in a reference to the ancient Proto-Indo-European symbology of the object as a representation of the world’s new beginning’s inherent fragility, and is posed against, while being gently threatened, by the artist’s moment of self-reflection.

The ceramic columns, Paths to Paradise were partly inspired by the jagged ancient limestone pillars at the beaches of Fårö, Sweden. The sculptures are assembled of stacked cylinders, covered in ceramic flowers and wormlike shapes, as well as occasional glimpses of an old Wedge-wood saucer or two still peeking through the opulent glaze. These vertical structures, with their colorful lightbulbs protruding from flower buds and twisted branches, evoke the mystical power one might feel in a forest or the high desert and call to mind the myth of Daphne’s transformation into a tree, or the surreal glow in Henri Rousseau’s painting of La Belle et la Bête, while simultaneously evoking Chris Burden’s iconic lights of the Miracle Mile. In these, as in the artist’s collaged canvases, parts and fragments of things that were formerly whole live on in other contexts and places, reflective of the exhibition’s overarching intention as a meditation on the concepts of roots and Circles of life.