Artwork Title: Green Grapes in a Turquoise Teacup II

Green Grapes in a Turquoise Teacup II, 2013

Susan Jane Walp

Painting reached a turning point with Paul Cézanne wherein a picture would no longer be conceived simply as a window onto the world with the artist at a remove from the act of creating. Working from direct observation of life whether as portrait, still life or landscape, Cézanne emphasized the artifice of the planar canvas and brute matter of paint as vehicles for laying bare his own sensations and thought processes. He did away with the space between creator and creation, absorbing his ideas and sensibility into a work’s facture. The painter Susan Jane Walp could be an heir to this tradition. Her sensibility as a painter and the paintings she makes feel resolutely bound together, drawing the viewer in with their conviction. On view at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Walp’s new works in oil on gessoed paper, portray simple still life items resting on a surface. Working with a tamped down tonal palette, her vases and bowls with spiral grooves and funneled spouts, bring to mind Giorgio Morandi’s modest abutments of a few tabletop objects. Without the torpid haze of Morandi, Walp’s objects are more crystalline and sharp even with chalky pallors, a bit like snapshots lifted from a Pompeian fresco. It is pleasurable to take in Walp’s paintings and consider the formal decisions she makes in relation to the conceptual project at hand. How she relates the size of the paper to the objects being depicted with figure and ground abstracting into colored shapes, or how she dematerializes the objects while staying true to their unique peculiarities. One notes her touch and how she applies the medium, sometimes smudgy or thinned to an exact viscosity in order to capture the air, weight, and character of a crisply folded cloth, stem on a bunch of grapes or the space between table legs. [https://hyperallergic.com/236411/painting-everday-objects-in-all-their-glory/]
Uploaded on May 20, 2018 by Suzan Hamer

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