Carla Aurich

 

 

Reviews


Carla Aurich by Dana Spiotta

Bob Dylan famously sang of a woman who has you "start out standing, proud
to steal her anything she sees" only to finally have you "peeking through a
keyhole down upon your knees."

Carla Aurich's paintings have that feel, of keyhole glimpses into dreams and bodies.
There is the Alice in Wonderland feel as well, of psychedelic wonderland trips down the rabbit hole.
These paintings change as you look at them, revealing layers you want to contemplate, and soothing
symmetries that evoke oddly disturbing things: body orifices, peep holes, organic membranes.
Portals leaking the inside to the outside and vice versa.

"Cadence" is such a painting, a perfectly symmetrical butterfly-like
orifice, either a hole leading in or a hovering object in a color field. The
layered colors are like leaves of a delicate plant or the wings of an insect.
However, it suggests no object--it is a globe on a flat expanse of
green-brown paint, like a meditation or an apparition, or a tiny chink in a
thought that promises another enveloping world inside. In some ways its
utter precision and its tiny discretion seem nun-like and pristine. It is
peaceful and self-contained even as it hints at depth and otherness.

"Pirouette" expands the self-containment, opens it larger until the
colors in the center dominates the background--we are closer in, or it is
upon us. Still it soothes with its symmetry, its meditative patterning, and
the beautiful tissue layers of undulative paint. Part mandala, part spin
art--perhaps spin art made from insect wings or maybe a Rorschach blotter for
an ecstasy clinic.

Viewed in the aggregate, Aurich's paintings--especially the earlier
highly symmetrical ones like "Pirouette"--create a Nebraska farmer's wife's
quilt, albeit one made if she sewed while listening to Jimi Hendrix, and let
her bright Mid Western colors run Indian and dark, to reds and browns, to
yellows and greens, and in earthy, organic tones.

Aurich's later paintings swerve from the earlier symmetries. She breaks
from one central rounded orifice to several apertures. Here the colors get
more psychedelic and synthetic. The orifices double and overlap, they move
to corners and out to the edges of the canvas. These paintings seem to
indicate a move to a more ironic sensibility. In fact, in Aurich‚s studio,
among the canvases, one can spot some semi-ironic pop culture inspirations.

Notably the cover art from an old Boston album (you know,the one every
teenager in the seventies had, with the airship "guitar"). But you can see
the parallels, the way the spaceship guitar becomes almost abstract, and the
color-hole that invites you to another (presumably power-riffed and
elongated-solo-ridden) other world. Aurich has a lot of whimsy in these
newer paintings, starting with the titles: "Muffy" has voluptuous color, and
many entrance points

"Stacked" hints at both Art Nouveau and Haight Ashbury--intricate, filigreed,
with mirrored doublings. The colors here are not soothing and pretty, but deep
and full of possibility. The longer you look, the longer you want to look. Aurich is
always getting at the images that seem to pull you in and suggest worlds other than
what is merely seen.

But in their movement inward, and in their patterning toward a kind of
return, they also suggest concealment--a movement in and out. A playful
aperture that rolls open, teases, then closes again. So we keep looking--we
are helpless but to look--and find ourselves peeking through keyholes down
upon our knees.

Dana Spiotta is the author of Lightning Field, a novel.

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