After a fireworks display smoke hangs in uncombed knots and curls across the sky, like dragon locks, while afterimages of light-effects float against the back of the eye. Similarly Jenniffer Omaitz’ latest series of paintings at her exhibit titled Noise recreate the polished surface of the night, remembering the way that light explodes across darkness, flashing, lingering, and fading. Her 60”/60” Tweekend is mostly a large square expanse of deep black oil paint and glossy medium, glinting with a high, reflective sheen, like the hood of a limo -- one parked close to the action. That action is a big part of Omaitz’ subject in the works at 1point618 -- the jerking, twisting, rough and smooth psycho-social energies of the international DJ scene, building bonfires of flaring glitz and hissing electronic noise. Jumping along Tweekend’s bottom margin a low horizon of orange and white loops dances from left to right, reaching a crescendo with a liquid-looking streak of aquamarine, shooting upward at a forty-five degree angle. Beyond that moment of launch, a toothy zigzag of Colgate-white chews down across curving sets of yellow and lavender lines. Omaitz often works from photos taken on long drives. Sometimes she uses filters and time exposures, or relies on the motion of the hand-held camera and the car she’s travelling in; either way her distortion of the beadwork of headlamps and streetlights and neon that decorate the modern night end up transcribing the intimate rhythms of human motion. Since Omaitz doesn’t display her photo sources there’s no way to know how closely the paintings approximate the images on film. But neither reproduction nor depiction seem to be seriously at issue in these paintings. The photos they’re based on may resemble abstract works, but Omaitz’ paintings are the real thing, dependent for their success on subtle interactions of figure and ground, line and surface, opacity and transparency, as crucially personal as a doodle or a tattoo. Their project is not to reconstruct the chemistry of a photograph in oil paint, but to evoke the alchemy of excitement itself, generating a visual condensation of all the sensual and chemical shifts that compose a night on the town. Tweekend reads like an opening gambit, an intro to some song twitched by a DJ’s quick finger -- like spotting a casino on a lonely stretch of road. White Noise, by contrast, seems like the climactic moment later that same night, a blaring epiphany webbing the available space so tightly with white-hot thrills that you have to walk right up to the canvas to feel the squeeze of Omaitz’ narrow brushstrokes as they frantically obliterate any notion of objective space. This moment of overload builds from the edges of the canvas. White lines, alternating in places with semi- transparent streaks of garden green and burnt orange, stagger in from the corners and edges of the five foot square work. The background here isn’t desert black but a rich interior green, like a pool beyond the splash of a waterfall. In the context of modernist painting and its afterglow this painting, and almost all of Omaitz’ explorations here, have to do with the idea of the grid and that a theory of form offers solace for the mutability, the death of actual things, the finiteness of events. Her grids are bent out of shape, as if under siege from a subatomic realm, warped by a physics of passion that flies against the stern walls of such comfort. It is an art of ecstasy, and of doubt. The most intriguing painting at Noise is another 60”/60” oil on canvas work titled Moment of Silence. If it were part of a novel it would be a lengthy vignette about the romance and character of line and the way it always embodies the third dimension, either through presence or absence, by dividing and cutting or by lying on top of things like string across the smooth curve of a balloon, or like a vein bulging just beneath the skin. In Moment of Silence the major force is a knotted lariat of light, roping in much of the painting’s interior, roan-brown, burnt sugar-rich space. After swooping around the perimeter this scud of creamy paint gathers itself into a snake’ s head loop toward the middle, capturing the viewer’s attention as surely as a cobra or a noose. Sweeping transparent currents of blood red coagulate in the upper half of the canvas, floating at some depth beneath the white rope, while a spray of more delicate pale lines loops across the middle. Meanwhile, up the right side a network of curving parallel horizontal lines hook into a vertical arc, like basketry, or delicate marine vertebrae. All of these marks seem squeezed on and are raised slightly from the surface of the painting, like scars. That they have, on close examination, an almost sculptural, quite non-linear quality lends them an air of intense urgency. This is not light or a depiction of it, but light incarnate, running or slithering through the viscous textures of Omaitz’ splendid night colors with a thousand little feet. The risky compositional coherence of Moment of Silence is especially successful, gaining visual interest as it moves horizontally and diagonally across Omaitz’ square format. By comparison most of the smaller works on view are essentially studies, lacking the scope that her larger paintings are able to explore. But this is not true of two delightful 18”/18” works titled Telephone and Dancing Loops. In each of these Omaitz deploys her thick-and-thin, semi-impasto of white paint to suggest an object-like, planar presence. Both have a whimsical flair, especially Telephone. It’s not easy to pin down just what’s so charming about it, but it has something to do with the crooked way the white polygonal shape is split down the middle, and the intense long looping of yellow lines that intersect that crunchy, chewy, aqua and lavender gap. On another level the image evokes the tangled complexity of communication, and perhaps describes the aura of personality that sticks to function, as we supplement our soupy biological selves with various contrivances. The latest ringtones join Omaitz’ brief index of contemporary tropes, filling out a show that is all about what it means to be alive in the night in the 21st century. [Cleveland Free Times 5/7/08] |
Night Shifts Jenniffer Omaitz at 1poin618 gallery |
Jenniffer Omaitz, Moment of Silence