BARRY WHISTLER GALLERY

LORRAINE TADY
Inter -Spatial

May 18 – June 22, 2024

Opening Reception: May 18 // 5-7pm

Lorraine Tady is an artist living and working in Dallas, represented by Barry Whistler Gallery since 1994. Her first solo exhibition with the gallery was in 1999 and most recent group exhibitions and publications include On Screen/Off Screen: Contemporary Painting and Technology, Barry Whistler Gallery; Texas Women: A New History of Abstract Art, San Antonio Museum of Art; The Adjacent Possible, Muscarelle Museum of Art, Williamsburg, VA; and MULTILAYER Vision 20/20, Stiftung Konzeptuelle Kunst, Germany.

This solo exhibition by Lorraine Tady will represent her new body of work, mostly consisting of 7 large scale canvases which have incorporated elements from her monotypes, drawings, and smaller canvases. In Gavin Morrison’s essay we can understand the perception game of Lorraine’s compositional elements:

“…Tady is teasing at the types of representation quoting diagrammatic illustration, complicating representation where the referenced schematics are a codification of the world, making that which is intangible, visible, within
the paintings the schematics become objects which are neither purely formal nor carriers of their original meaning. Even so, they are representational. As our eyes read across the surface of the paintings, we linger on those moments that feel familiar, untangling them from the unknown. However, devoid of their context, any specific form defiantly remains ambiguous.”

“The human condition is to look for pattern and familiarity. We extrapolate from what we see to what something is by means of our past experiences. We make certain mental leaps and are quick to take shortcuts. Seeing is, at least in part, an act of the imagination. Looking at these paintings we are made aware of being complicit in the work. We are enacting Duchamp’s edict: “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting.” But for Tady, it feels that this process is being extended, the spectator is made to undertake a re-drawing, a mental tracing of the lines. There is a closer parity between the painter and the viewer, than that which Duchamp suggests. Lorraine talks eloquently of the wrestling of drawing into painting. A process that loops back on itself, directly implicates the viewer and that reveals its hidden structure.

The field of color in which this mark-making occurs in Tady’s paintings is mostly undelineated. Colors fade together and burst through one another. It is as though we are given a view into another cosmos, a universe
governed by conditional interactions of which we know nothing. Yet moments exist within the paintings which assert them as the products of stratified invention. There are instances and passages in the work that glitch–an unexpected hard line will cause the termination of an otherwise organic form. This calls back to the forms and mechanisms of looking, and is a declaration of artifice and detachment. Further to this, often there is a slight acknowledgement of the edge of the painting: an expanse of color will terminate just before the end of the canvas. This creates framing within the painting and affirms the singularity of the painting.

Barry Whistler Gallery
315 Cole Street Suite 120, Dallas, TX 75207
214.939.0242
Hours: Wednesday through Saturday
Noon – 5pm
and by appointment.
barrywhistlergallery.com