HUDSON, New York — In case your first ideas about Rebecca Purdum’s continually fluctuating summary work are what they remind you of — for example, a mowed hayfield in winter seen beneath a moody grey sky — you wouldn’t essentially be unsuitable. You’ll, nevertheless, miss the deeper pleasure of not having the ability to pin them down. That is the conundrum these works current; they might resemble features of the pure world however they allude to an expertise past language. They thwart that craving to assert possession by naming, which all of us expertise, however which might forestall us from seeing and feeling sensorially. The artist’s refusal to create discursive work is radical.
Every work within the exhibition Rebecca Purdum: 11 Work at Pamela Salisbury Gallery is its personal world. Purdum doesn’t make artwork serially. Utilizing all of the paint she has for every bit, she applies it to a canvas or linen floor along with her arms and later scrapes it down with a palette knife. Each portray is an opaque diary of addition and subtraction, documenting a cycle of protecting and uncovering. Although traces of earlier marks stay, Purdum leaves no historical past of what path she took to succeed in her vacation spot. Her work are actually and metaphorically self-effacing.
Rebecca Purdum, “Harbor” (2024), oil on linen
In “Inside, Outside” (2024), she covers the floor with a darkish terre verte pigment (also called “green earth”). The method of build up and scraping down is inimitable. The portray’s darkest, densest space reads as each an oval and a gap, a pit that can’t be entered. A lighter, barely legible kind is seen within the middle. What does its presence signify? Its resistance to definition underscores the hole between expertise and language.
In “January” (2025) and “Harbor” (2024), paint and woven linen floor have turn into one, a file of scraping away and erosion. Within the latter, the densest space floats close to the highest, a darkish maroon cloud. At the same time as it could provoke a way of weariness, just a few indecipherable white marks stir different emotions. What are we to make of those marks inside this darkness? Or that this space appears to drift? How will we interpret the inexperienced marks in “January” that look like each a part of the abraded floor and separate from it?
Rebecca Purdum, “Inside, Outside” (2024), oil on panel
As with the maroon cloud, regardless of how onerous we strive, we can’t peer deeper into the floor. The will to see deeper acknowledges the infinitesimal existence of the person. Is the “Harbor” wherein we search an inconceivable refuge a way of infinity? Purdum’s work at all times make me hyper-conscious of my inescapable solitariness, without delay unhappy and wondrous. They remind me of the opening line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The First Elegy”: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels’/Orders?”
Purdum juxtaposes that longing with an consciousness of fleeting phenomenon: the dense floor of the maroon cloud and its flickering, altering, multicolored environment. She is aware of that our lives are comprised of the rapid world of sight and contact and of immeasurable actuality, and doesn’t need to lose her consciousness of both. What persists is time, and the infinite change that it brings consumes the whole lot. These work flip us inward, nudge us towards our inchoate emotions, as their surfaces reveal time’s abrasive results. On this regard, they distinguish themselves from the summary colour fields of Rothko and Reinhardt, whose titles mirror the timeless, nevertheless tragic.
Like these two artists, Purdum’s work are inconceivable to completely seize photographically, even in our exact digital age. The sunshine slowly yielded by the altering floor diffuses as shortly as we see it, leaving us not sure of what we’re taking a look at, and the place to pay attention our consideration. In wrestling with formlessness, she devotes herself to a type of abstraction uncommon in as we speak’s artwork world.
Rebecca Purdum, “October” (2023), oil on panel
Rebecca Purdum, “Small Gesture” (2024), oil on panel
Rebecca Purdum: 11 Work continues at Pamela Salisbury Gallery (362 1/2 Warren Avenue, Hudson, New York) by way of April 6. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
