Work from Elexis Van Reen

Elexis Van Reen’s paintings feature brilliant jewel colors and densely packed abstract forms. Broad, sweeping brushstrokes fill her canvases with an almost violent strength and energy. Her typical palette suggests her connection to a Caribbean past, yet Van Reen’s recent work welcomes a darkness that obscures the pure sunny brilliance of a tropical landscape. Beneath the technical mastery of their surface these paintings harbor a complicated emotional structure built from family history and personal experience.

 

Van Reen speaks of “overstimulating” her senses as she develops her paintings—culling imagery from mass media, popular magazines, and the history of painting, she starts her compositions with external everyday references. As each painting nears completion, however, Van Reen often finds the work transformed by personal memories or immediate emotions. What begins as an abstract mood finds its full result only in its final connection to the expressive immediacy of Van Reen’s life.

 

The formal rigor of Van Reen’s canvases lends itself well to the narrative layers embedded in her paintings. She often imposes limitations on her process—forbidding herself the use of a favorite color, inscribing the surface with a specific form, or prioritizing a particular palette. In her 2004 work A Call Late One Night, Van Reen transforms the most basic range of primary colors into a monumental composition that recalls the power of Basquiat’s late work. Pushing acid greens and muddy browns up against bright red and blue, and submerging glimpses of hot pink, turquoise, and purple beneath wide swaths of chalky grey, Van Reen challenges the viewer to resolve these chromatic tensions into a coherent map of ideas. The artist herself proposes a resolution with the thin white paintstroke that encompasses the central form, defining a shape that is simultaneously a classic vanitas skull, an imaginary diagram of brain functions, and an ancient cartographer’s rough draft of the known world. Perhaps not surprisingly, the artist explains that the work was completed after learning of a family illness.

 

In Should I or Shouldn’t I?, also from 2004, Van Reen has expanded her range of markmaking. Dispersed among her typically broad swatches of thick and sheer paint, new gestures emerge: a pink oilstick scribble, a black and white smear at the left edge that at first glance evokes a silkscreened newsclipping, and an army of short brushstrokes at the heart of the composition. All of these new marks animate the canvas and set the viewer’s eyes roaming across the image for these clues to depth and surface. The cluster of feathery fuschia strokes in the center, however, also introduces an idea of multiplicity and reproduction that drives the narrative potential of the work. The layers of paint, color, and gesture in Should I or Shouldn’t I? and other recent work not only add depth to the composition, but they also establish an emotional depth to Van Reen’s deceptively abstract subject matter.

 

In a 1960 interview, Franz Kline spoke of the transformation of abstract shapes and lines into forms with emotional meaning: “A curved line or a rhythmical relationship do have, in some way, some psychological bearing, not only on the person who looks at them after they’ve been conceived but also they do have a lot to do with the creative being who is involved with wondering just how exciting it can be. And then, of course, the elimination and agitation and the simplification come in through the many varied experiences that go on just through the experience of painting.” Van Reen clearly carries on and expands the legacy of abstract painting suggested by Kline’s statement. Binding her own psychological and emotional universe to amorphous forms of abstract color, Van Reen not only embeds a personal narrative in her work, but also invites viewers to look beyond the painted surface to recognize their own varied experiences.

 

 

Rachael Arauz, Ph.D