Works on paper: Jane Swavely
Forthcoming exhibition
Overview
Works on Paper. Plain and simple, as Jane Swavely puts it. And it is true: sixteen works, all on paper. Nothing hidden in the title. Except there is very little that is plain about them and what happens on these sheets.
Works on Paper. Plain and simple, as Jane Swavely puts it. And it is true: sixteen works, all on paper. Nothing hidden in the title. Except there is very little that is plain about them and what happens on these sheets. Color arrives with surprising force. Acid yellow pushes into pale green. Violet gathers and dissolves into blue. A dark green field seems to contain its own source of light. Elsewhere, a dense brown form hovers above a small white eruption. The colors don’t simply sit on the surface. They flare up, recede, seep into one another. Sometimes they seem less painted than caught in the act of appearing. There is something of the afterimage in them: that strange patch of color that remains when you close your eyes after looking at something a little too bright. An afterimage belongs neither entirely to the world nor to the imagination. It is produced somewhere between the two.
There are moments when Swavely’s works suggest perhaps landscapes, smoke, light moving through water – and then, almost immediately, they don’t. Recognition flickers and disappears. What remains is color and the sensation it produces. There is something fleeting about these works. Some seem to be coming into view, others on the verge of disappearing. A form gathers and then loses its rims. A color emerges from behind another, or sinks back into it. The works seem to hold these different states at once: something forming, something fading, something still present as a trace. Paper matters here. It is less imposing than canvas, more immediate. It receives what happens. Marks, smudges, scratches and changes of direction remain visible. The edges are slightly irregular. We see where color has been pushed, where it has thinned out, where something underneath has been left to show through. Nothing is entirely sealed off. This is where plain and simple becomes interesting. Swavely doesn’t need to tell us what these works are pictures of. They are works on paper. Color has been put down, moved around, rubbed away, layered, allowed to spread.
Plain and simple.
And then we look – and something keeps shifting.
Text by Tessa Praun
Curator and writer, The Wanderlust Institute of Art