CHICAGO — Abstract painting is decadent again. Put your nose to the canvas and the Victorian era rushes up like a wave of honey. Our age of excess begets many things, from trinkets to narcissism to wisdom. For the maximalist painter Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, more is more, and there is glory to be gleaned from her overabundance—of desire, of intellect, of creativity, of destruction—which she delivers in breathless, synesthetic outpourings.
The artist’s second solo exhibition at Corbett vs. Dempsey (through March 15) is forged conceptually around “The Drunken Boat,” an 1871 poem by Arthur Rimbaud from which she snags phrases to cobble together her exhibition title, “Violet Fogs Azure Snot.” Zuckerman-Hartung’s profuse lyrical gestures mirror Rimbaud’s delirious poem, which exuberantly describes a vessel lost at sea, sinking and swirling into mysterious depths. Indeed, the nine canvases are soggy with paint, and the painter has attempted to emulate Rimbaud’s flirtation with aesthetic rapture: Wonder and horror serve as tools to waken the mind.
Zuckerman-Hartung’s paintings seem nostalgic for a day when abstraction could titillate public taste, but her work winds up as doodles in the margins of the Whistler versus Ruskin debate. Not to belittle doodles—there are several in this show, and they are productively confusing, as doodles ought to be. Indeed, this work provokes wide-eyed confusion as a way toward knowledge. The pain or pleasure, failure or success, of surmounting obstacles—in life, work, or the imagination—is the battle Zuckerman-Hartung’s pieces represent.
(L:R) Molly Zuckerman-Hartung's "oa" (2013) and "oi" (2013)
Overworked canvases prove that work was done there. Drop cloths are stretched into painting supports. In oa, 2013, an eye-shaped cavity is stuffed with muslin folded like intestines and poured paint: It could be the scene of a messy birth, the result of excessive creative fecundity. Bedsheets (as painting’s surface) are paint-stained, as if by fever dreams. Raw canvas signals raw emotions. Zuckerman-Hartung’s body is indexed everywhere in her works, and she mixes metaphors like she mixes paint. Instead of building a boat, she grabs fistfuls of water—but that is the only way to get wet.
A version of this article appears in the May 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
