"Walking into Madeleine Bialke's second solo exhibition at Newchild feels like stepping into a haunted forest of memory-an unearthly terrain where the living and the spectral converge. Eidolons, a term borrowed from Walt Whitman meaning "spiritual images of the immaterial," captures the essence of this new body of work, painted over the course of this year, and born from a brief but profound journey through California's Sequoia National Park."
"This exhibition is both an homage and a reckoning. Through Bialke's fractured memory, the Sequoias rise as monumental figures of time-towering, near-mythic beings whose forms bear the marks of humanity's impact on the climate, yet endure with quiet resilience. Their rings carry the memory of fires, storms, and centuries of change, as if the story of the Earth itself has been etched into their living flesh. Bialke holds these images like relics or "eidolons," preserving what is most precious before it slips into history."
Paintings present Sequoia trees as eidolons—spiritual, spectral images where living and immaterial converge. The works originate from two days among ancient redwoods in Sequoia National Park, capturing the trees' immensity and millennia-witnessed presence. Rings and bark register fires, storms, and centuries, bearing visible marks of climate and human impact. Surrounding landscapes appear as wide, barren mountains and ashen slopes where swaths of trees have burned to skeletons, forming a shadow to the living grove. The imagery balances homage and reckoning, preserving monumental, near-mythic beings while acknowledging their precarious endurance amid increasingly violent wildfires.
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