Juxtapoz Magazine - Say Less: Eleanor Swordy @ Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

"'In two pictures in Eleanor Swordy's new show, at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin, a figure stares from the center of the canvas towards the viewer. The eyes of these figures appear glazed, since each is looking at (or perhaps more accurately, through) a task - basket weaving and trimming paper flowers - that her hands are plying with somnambulistic attention. Although outward-facing, there is nothing confrontational about either figure, each being wholly absorbed in her respective activity, if not nonplussed."

"Swordy's paintings often feature devices which allegorize their own artifice. In For You, the picture's lower edge becomes a surface, gathering stray fragments of colored paper dropped by the flower-trimmer. In this typically playful way, Swordy hints at the painting's objecthood, self-reflexivity being an important aspect of her work. Here, as more explicitly in Set Apart, depicted action and technical application together encourage a sense that the painting's surface embodies (or stands parallel to) a kind of invisible interface or force field."

"On either side of this plane, foreground and background can be read as distinct planes of reality; these could in turn be defined as the actual and the virtual, or, perhaps, the real and the imagined or remembered. Narratives are therefore suggested as much by formal properties as by pictorial description; the self takes a back seat to the world of activity, or stares dreamily through glass into a dreamlike world outside."

Galerie Max Hetzler presents Say Less, a solo exhibition of new works by Eleanor Swordy in Berlin, her first in the city and second with the gallery. Two paintings depict long-haired figures with glazed eyes absorbed in repetitive tasks—basket weaving and trimming paper flowers—suggesting stand-ins for the painter. Paintings use devices that allegorize artifice: lower edges gather paper fragments and surfaces suggest invisible interfaces. Foreground and background read as distinct planes—actual and virtual, real and imagined—so narrative arises from formal properties as much as pictorial description. Recent layering of scumbled color increases spatial tension.

Read at Juxtapoz