Staring into the Abyss
Reviewing "Erosion" at Chicago Grand Gallery
For the longest time, I found it difficult to review dark abstract works. My practice never avoided heavy topics, yet I’d always preferred to steer away from work that clearly made use of visual discomfort: muddy colors, unpleasant forms, blatant chaos… It wasn’t until more recent years that I began to gain a deeper understand regarding the importance to capture the messiness of the ongoing political, environmental, and humanitarian turmoil without sugar-coating — to intentionally make your audience flinch, shift, and frown as we witness a global retrogress into authoritarianism centered around censorship, colonial suppression, racial discrimination, and misogyny.
Intentionality is everywhere at “Erosion,” a solo exhibition by Chicago-based abstractor mixed-media artist and art educator Olivia Petrides at Chicago Grand Gallery. Using layers of ink, paper, watercolor, gouache, and fragments of newspapers, Petrides create large-scale abstract work that “blur the line between atmospheric and political realities.”
Most pieces in this exhibition focus on the tension between what attempts to come forth and what strikes to hold it back, emphasizing an inevitable failure of containment and a fruitless attempt to cleanse and restore.
In “Flooding the Zone,” a triptych of ink, gouache, and newspaper collage on paper, The bright yellow struggles to contain the dark, muddy color from expanding. The motion and fluidity of the dirty blobs contrasts the still peace of the bright edge. At the same time, it felt as if someone had tried to wipe the surface clean: to restore the gold, or whatever spotless material was underneath, only to result in a haphazard mess of smears, mocking that any attempt of order would only make the contamination worse.
However, do not accuse the artist of not trying to restore some sort of balance within a hopeless course of action.
In “Persistence of Chaos,” Petrides directed crisp, white lines across the smeared backgrounds, forming geometric shapes looked like morphing, unfolding, polygon cubes. These lines are thin, yet conspicuous as they are only element that hints discipline, stability, and boundaries in what is otherwise almost unpleasant to look at. Human minds crave directions and human eyes seek guidance. When looking at a piece of art, most subconsciously search for focal points. Therefore, I found myself trying to come up with some sort of logic following these white lines, to justify, explain, and read-into the mucky black, brown, and grey behind them, holding onto those white lasers like they were my lifelines.
Towering over the viewer on the clear, bright, and white gallery walls, Petrides’ work confronted its audience like lurking serpents, silent but ready to strike. Uncomfortable, dangerous, haunting as they are intended to be because we are supposed to feel such uneasiness as we witness hate, hostility, and division rotting through the fibers of our civilizations.
The threat to democracy, and that to a healthy earth that would sustain future generations, is so accurately and viciously captured via simple media, I thought as I stared into “Be There, Will Be Wild!,” a direct reference back to Trump’s 2020 tweet that allegedly fueled the Jan. 6th riot that took over the White House. The mass of black ink irked me. They looked like blazing flames. Wild, indeed. Like the wild fire that engulfed… oh, too many homes, roads, forests, to even recount, like the evil and hatred that had usurped by ten folds since the men took office again.
Petrides did a fabulous job with “Erosion.” She gave the audience only two choices: scruff through the gallery and escape as quickly as you can, or stare straight into the abyss. You will be disturbed — nauseous, even. Your skin will crawl and your heart will race. It’s a heavy show to walkthrough: more the heavier to review, to feel the inability of coming up with any softer descriptions other than articulating these pieces for what they are — unpleasantries.
So intentionally crude. So purposefully cruel. And so brilliantly timely, poignant and necessary.
Thank you for the thoughtful review of the exhibition!