PRESENTATION: Amy Feldman-Goodnight Light

Amy Feldman is recognized for her iconic painting language and commitment to large-scale gray-on-gray abstractions. Her investigation in the color gray highlights the significance and potential that can be found in neutrality, how something can appear neutral but is, in fact, charged with great power of expression. Feldman typically works in series, presenting distilled iterations of unique forms, which relate to how images and signs are quickly interpreted, remembered, and misremembered

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Eva Presenhuber Archive

Amy Feldman’s work offers the viewer a vivid conversation between the physical and formal language of abstract painting. This is evidenced in the interactions she creates between the figure and ground, questioning the hierarchy of the two. Consistently working in just shades of grey, Feldman has developed an abstract sign system that alludes to systems of writing and the transmission of information. With this reduced palette, she aims to strip away associations and limitations that many colors would introduce to the painting. Similarly, the bulbous, and irregular forms that she paints are just familiar enough to be reminiscent yet – as with her color palette – elusive enough to dodge literal decoding. A clear allusion to the body and to Feldman’s position as female painter persists in the work. The variously-scaled gray paintings in Amy Feldman’s solo exhibition “Goodnight Light”, highlight her unique visual language contain silkscreen elements, as well as her own fingerprint touches with thick paint. This addition of tactility, an urgent act of the hand, signals the artist’s duello with the physical and formal aspects of abstract painting. The surfaces of Feldman’s recent works are enlarged and exaggerated facsimiles of raw canvas over pristine gray fields. In this presentation, Feldman introduces a moiré effect within her printed fields. The moiré that appears as another new direction furthers Feldman’s relationship with tonalities as well as her conversation with the viewer. Imbuing the paintings with a reverberating finish, this coloring on the surfaces signals an exploration of both light rays and light’s absence. As the artist says “On first inspection, the viewer might not initially notice the printed ground and assume my paintings have rough surfaces. The illusion becomes clear when the work is examined up close. I am excited by this moment, the viewer’s suspension of disbelief, when they acknowledge their own capability to accept fiction as fact.”  The exhibition’s title encapsulates Feldman’s subversion of in-betweenness and permanence. “Goodnight Light” is both a farewell and a welcome, a release and contraction and, most gloriously, an assumption of the nocturnal dark and knowledge for the light to return. In “Aura Storm”, two cloud-like forms vertically bookend a light gray mass with borders painted into a pixelated geometry. Their symmetry is challenged with linear smears of finger paint. Imprints of a second and a human urge, the lines resist the fleeting moment with the alchemic reality of the acrylic paint. The satirical touch of the maker is evident in “Blob Throb” with a generous dollop of white paint adorning the left bottom corner of another seemingly symmetrical orchestration of bulbous erratic lines and combat between white and grey washes. The cloudy blob contains dualities: both an interrupter and ornament, softness and rigidity, as well as temporal and of the instant. From the image saturation online and off to technology’s yielding of its own aesthetic codings; glitches, pixels, or blurs, the promise in abstraction still provokes Feldman’s decade-long relationship with the canvas. The transformation along the way has been tied to the necessity and possibility of foundational forms, such as bulbs, curves, lines, or zigzags, all while the speed of light is overshadowed by the pace with which information is disseminated, and attention spans are tightened. In such a landscape of visual bountifulness Feldman’s insistently gray and white abstractions attempt to complicate the numerical hegemony of time, rendering its passage as a malleable order rather than a rigid progression.

Photo: Amy Feldman, Untitled, 2022, Ink on paper, Sheet 23 x 30.5 cm / 9 x 12 in, Frame 26 x 33.5 x 4 cm / 10 1/4 x 13 1/4 x 1 1/2 in, © Amy Feldman, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber

Info: Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Waldmannstrasse 6, Zürich, Switzerland, Duration: 10/9-26/11/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, www.presenhuber.com/