
Suzanne McClelland has been fixated on the gaps between language, notion, and understanding for many years now, starting within the Nineteen Nineties. Highland Seer, the artist’s second exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, extends her explorations of this theme. These 13 work, all from this 12 months, are pressing but refined rejoinders to look carefully.
Highland Seer takes its title from the pseudonymous Scottish author of 1920’s Studying Tea Leaves, A Highland Seer. This quick quantity of verse explains the best way to discover that means in leaves, shapes, and premonitions, providing readers a method to interpret the current and predict the long run. McClelland likewise suggests shut wanting and listening to learn between signal and rhetoric on this exhibition. Every portray provides small clues to puzzle out bigger patterns, akin to looping, gestural abstraction that obliquely figures numbers, or distorted however acquainted symbols, just like the cartoon character the Street Runner, seen particularly in works akin to “PREY – (heads or tails)” and “PREY – (tails or heads).”
Extra so than these figurative cues, nevertheless, that means is actually mediated in these work by means of the sluggish, attentive issues of enormous passages of intertwined colour and kind. As an example, the title of the black, ruby pink, white, and grey “Blind Contour-Why do you Wait within the Shadowy Marshes?,” the primary portray to the left upon coming into the gallery, impels one to seek for a face, which does certainly materialize within the higher portion of the canvas. However the face turns into bodily as McClelland’s washes of paint texturize right into a bubbly, skin-like texture. The portray assumes a way of physicality not from the artist’s supple use of image however somewhat from her adroit formalism, which turns into much more visceral when set towards her cerebral symbolism.



The concept that one thing solely takes full form and that means juxtaposed with one thing else is prolonged in works like “GHOST at Daybreak-Sybil’s Retreat” and “GHOST at Nightfall-Sybil’s Retreat,” that are put in alongside the gallery’s lengthy left wall Each items function sloping heaps of their left corners — one thing that, by nature, can’t be lowered, solely taking form through accumulation. By together with these heaps — and particular occasions of day — McClelland acknowledges that that means depends on notion and context, in a nod to the haystacks of Monet.
Place and time, and the way these intersect in our notion, are of specific significance to a grouping of works indicated with “pleinair” within the title, lots of which had been made exterior. To create these works, McClelland laid unstretched canvas instantly onto gravel earlier than pouring paint over, resulting in textured surfaces that reveal their setting and course of of constructing. Place, subsequently, turns into indistinguishable from the formal properties of those works.
Setting is paramount to the items contained within the cloistered house behind the gallery. Three large-scale work, every titled “Infinity’s Twin” appended with components akin to “earth,” allude to the vastness of the pure world. These works do certainly overwhelm when put in so tightly collectively on this small anteroom, however their richness of colour, form, and texture calls for shut consideration nonetheless. It’s then that particular person splashes, drips, and strokes of paint seem, indicating an abundance of the quiet areas past and between a cacophony of indicators and symbols.


Suzanne McClelland: Highland Seer continues at Marianne Boesky Gallery (507 West twenty fourth Road, Chelsea, Manhattan) by means of June 8.