Swerve/Collide • Christina McPhee and TL Solien at Left Field Gallery
By Madeleine Eve Ignon
At Left Field Gallery’s February show Swerve/Collide, an immediate connective space opens between the vibrant works of Christina McPhee and TL Solien. The space presents a visceral before and after feeling: Solien’s compact DeStijl-esque geometric abstractions are the before – steadfast arrangements of stained-glass pre-breakage, pre-explosion – while McPhee’s mysterious, untamed compositions are the after – the shards of broken glass as they vibrate in a tense, operatic field of suspension.
Swerve/Collide, Installation view, Left Field Gallery
The works by Solien, five on paper and seven on panel, are a departure from his dark-humored figurative work but employ the same bright palette and playful shapes. His works on paper are more compositionally exploratory, whereas the works on panel are more controlled and direct, more traditionally abstract. The works evade predictability, and flatness, revealing textured and painterly gestures on their surface.
T. L. Solien, Senate #3, flashe on panel, 2020.
T. L. Solien, Senate #2, flashe on panel, 2020.
McPhee’s five large paintings continue in, and expand on, her tradition of highly controlled and elegant mark-making. They speak a gestural language rich with references to the natural world and to physical and emotional landscape. Her dense, cinematic and palimpsestic works invite you in through their scrim via nuanced points of entry: a dart of intense orange, a window of Naples yellow. The works assert themselves both as images and as monoliths, jutting out from the wall with hefty edges (which are themselves fully considered, revealing glimpses of the underpainting). Are they space or surface, or both? Entire theses are contained within their edges.
Christina McPhee, Datura Telepathy, oil, found collage and ink on canvas, 2020.
Christina McPhee, Odalisque (That Sixties Vibe)
Solien and McPhee are unafraid of color; each body of work embraces the chaos and energy of their chosen palettes. The viewer is rewarded upon closer, more intimate looks into the sets of paintings; they reveal their process, their labor.
If McPhee’s works are vortexes or portals, teeming with content and meaning and daring you to enter, Solien’s are smaller windows, conveying loose, playful ideas. The two artists operate within distinctly different languages of and approaches to abstraction, but the show is harmonious, energetic, and alive – a very welcome respite of color and action in this seemingly endless period of disconnection and grief.
Swerve/Collide: Christina McPhee and TL Solien is on view February 6 to 28, 2021 at Left Field Gallery, 1036 Los Osos Valley Road, Los Osos
Cover: Christina McPhee, Sanctuary (Iniko’s Nest), 2020, oil, ink and dye on canvas.
