February 20 – March 28, 2020
224 W 30th Street #1005 (between Seventh and Eighth Aves)
New York, monyarowegallery.com

In the small rectangular space of Monya Rowe Gallery, up on the 10th floor of a midtown building, Vera Iliatova’s solo show – titled “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible” – takes her viewer on a surreal, nostalgic walk reminiscent of 1980s school day walks in St Petersburg, Russia. Slightly more than half a dozen moderately sized and small oil-and-acrylic paintings completed within the past year hang quitely on white walls. Iliatova reflects on her own past with deep longing for times both missed and long since passed, bringing strange, forlorn, cross-continental energy into the depicted spaces. 

One striking factor in all of these paintings is her master skill of composition. Specifically, the complexity of composition in Nothing is True and Everything is Possible (2020) echoes Nicolas Poussin’s Saints Peter and John Healing the Lame Man (1655). The poses in both paintings are derived from Roman antiquity, as if statues came to life and were captured in a still. The stillness in Iliatova and Poussin’s work is eerily similar but the subjects could not be more different. Iliatova handles multi- figure compositions with Poussin’s grace and, in this particular work, also ties in the architecture of stairs with organic rhythm. While the staged nature of her painting – in a contemporary context – may at first glance appear uncomfortable, the classical construction feels unmistakably familiar. In this case, teenage girls with wandering glances appear hanging out together, but remain emotionally removed from each other in an industrial building amid an anachronistic landscape outside the window. Iliatova’s painting thrives on that familiarity: young women, most likely school-age (right about when Iliatova herself moved to the United States from USSR), are positioned in poses suggesting conversation and interaction. Upon closer observation, however, every single figure appears implicitly lonely, gazing down or past the others. Where Poussin’s depictions of such gazes and poses play up the drama, in Iliatova’s work they mirror a state of being, one representing both nostalgia for a time since passed and a lost opportunity for connection. Upon first glance, one of her other paintings in the show, The Ties That Bind (2019), has a similar sentiment to Poussin’s The Finding of Moses (1638). Rhythm and composition are striking in the same way, but the meaning and the somewhat bizarre arrangement of young women in a park in Iliatova’s work sets them apart from the 17th century painter by bringing them into the contemporary. 

Similarly, Iliatova’s color palette reflects on the particularity of time and place. Granite grays cast a shadow over this body of work. The warm pink gray colors are reminiscent of riverbank pedestrian paths along the Neva and Fontanka Rivers in St. Petersburg where so many school girls have spent evenings hanging out after classes. Iliatova uses a distinct palette – well known to any St. Petersburg native – evoking the region’s long, dark winters, its rainy summers. The stone city that was built on swamps by Peter the Great is close to its inhabitants’ hearts, even the ones who left at a budding age. 

Iliatova uses paint to visualize the intangible subject of nostalgia. Even if the viewer is unfamiliar with the setting, there is a clear, recognizable sense of longing for the past. She doesn’t just yearn for one time or place, though, but a full bouquet of places, styles, relationships and interactions. Even though the light and feel is straight out of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s landscapes, the buildings in some of Iliatova’s works, such as The Big Reveal (2020), are somewhat industrial, bringing it into a modern context. The landscape is perhaps a wink at 18th and 19th-century painters, but the most fascinating mishmash occurs in the fashion of the figures. The combination of sweaters, dresses and patterns ranges from the 1960s to the 1990s and even today, where vintage clothing finds a new life through thrift shops. For example, a reclining figure in the foreground in Nothing is True and Everything is Possible wears a turquoise dress; this dress is reminiscent of a 1980s-era Bloomingdale’s catalog, but the adjacent figure could easily be taken as a contemporary passerby on the street in Gowanus. The mystery comes from the artist herself, who finds her models’ outfits in crevices of Brooklyn’s thrifting shops. The choice is conscious and deliberate as Iliatova paints and repaints every figure to be both relatable yet a standalone monument to time. How does one capture time in a still image? Iliatova seizes these moments by painting her subjects in passive actions such as reading, stretching or gazing outward.  

The painterly application of brushstrokes suggests both timing and an allusion to classical painting. Iliatova is a superbly skilled painter, who depicts her world with poetic intelligence. She employs an academic style, showing off the gestural nature of figure painting. Every stroke reflects a motion, yet everything is precise, with intention. Every element of application is thorough with realistic and painstakingly depicted figures to almost Gerhard Richter-esque, blurred backgrounds. She marries elements of the history of painting within bare square inches of her paintings, but does so seamlessly and effortlessly.  This expert mix of contemporary and classical style, combined with surreal anachronism transport viewers to another time and place while maintaining an air of familiarity. 

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December 20, 2019 through February 13, 2020
1 Main Street, between Plymouth and Water streets
Brooklyn, #mainwindowdumbo

Playing with recycled materials across two- and three-dimensional surfaces, Etty Yaniv’s site-specific installation, at Main Window in Dumbo, Run Off,  transcends visual boundaries,. (Comprising a window space on Main Street in DUMBO, Main Window has featured Brooklyn-based artists since 1980.) In this piece, Yaniv showcases her ability to use the language of material to subtly insert deliberate, familiar allusions to specific places while spurring dialogue around ecological awareness. Her unexpected gathering of  materials such as ribbon, plastic, bits of paper and other ephemera in combination with her own photography, transforms an extremely restricted space into an awesome new reality whose gravitas transcends its actual scale.

Windows are a prominent theme in Yaniv’s work, so it’s a natural progression to see her work actually installed in one. It acts both as a commemorative element and a barrier between the viewer and an untamable scene. The historic architectural gold framing gives the work a monumental quality, elevating the composition as a timeless representation of the past, present and future. The scene on display – water rushing down subway stairs – is well situated, evoking images of the devastating effects of Hurricane Sandy in one of the neighborhoods most affected by its destructive path

Her use of color is strategic and intentionally limited. The photographic elements within the installation – whether fragments or the main photograph of the stairs– are mostly black and white while the wild elements of plastic and mixed material are predominantly blue with sporadic splashes of other colors. The color is not spontaneous, however, but is strategically placed to elicit a message of conservation and call attention to the natural elements within the work.

Run Off assumes an almost interactive quality through the glass, as reflections of viewers and city life overlay the installation. Translucent outlines from adjacent fences seem to contour the stairway imagery, as the city’s skyline casts an imposing silhouette of buildings, fire escapes and other rigid structures along the upper portion of the piece. At night, the installation is further transformed as light casts ghostly reflections of viewers on top of the work, which only serves to underline the message of human influence on the environment. We are more than mere observers.

Beyond its environmental concerns, Run Off tells a dynamic story that changes with each subsequent viewing. Overall Yaniv’s allusions to escalating environmental crises are subtle and poetic, evoking trepidation and awe at where it might lead Environmental anxiety intersects the day-to-day realities of New Yorkers with images the gritty metal subway stairs completely immersed in water.

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July 21–to September 2, 2019
675 West 252nd Street at Bingham Road
The Bronx, wavehill.org

Large, semi-translucent, gesturally painted blue shapes optically sway in space in Riad Miah’s immersive site-specific installation, at Wave Hill’s Sunroom Project Space. “Waves of Light—Entwined Through the Tendrils of Time,” a project space exhibition curated by Eileen Jeng Lynch, explores monthly changes in light through painting in space, a complex retinal and emotional task. Painting on transparent Dura-Lar panels on both sides with oil and acrylic, he mixes large gestural strokes and his signature menagerie of dispersed drips. The shapes are strategically suspended from the ceiling across the perimeter of skylights, enabling a translucent glow throughout the space. A palette exploring a rich spectrum of blues selected for each hanging piece come from careful observation of the sky’s color at a given time each month, as viewed from Wave Hill. The shapes echo the verticality of the windows in the Sun Porch and century old wisteria intricately intertwined on the building outside. Amongst the hanging pieces, four, seaweed-like plastic structures cascade downward from the center of each skylight creating a juxtaposition of manmade and natural twists and turns.

In a departure from his more familiar painting work, but one that does nothing to compromise the essence of his painterly magic, Miah elegantly coaxes gestural painting into another realm. Playing with light, color and paint, the work reflects changing conditions in the space and surrounding environment. At any given time of day or season, the viewer can observe at least one shape that is reflective of the current particularity of hue outsides, creating an intense, metaphysical spirit of place. Miraculously, Miah is able to fuse awareness of space with an acute sense of the two dimensionality of his painting surface, handling this by suspending the paintings in such a way as to generate an illusion of floating. The technique of traditional painting was also modified to sustain the gestural nature of the brushstrokes. The artist uses various media and careful but swift application of acrylic paint to suspend his gestures in space while the gestural strokes are cut out and pasted back on the surface creating an uneven edge. The resulting mirage-like floatation effect further teases out a sensation of time, as each gesture appears frozen in its moment.

While Riad’s debt to David Reed with his autonomous gestural swirls is striking, his project has a deeper affinity with James Turrell’s Skylight and Skyspace series. Miah strives to achieve the unobtainable effect of the sky’s depth. But unlike Turrell, Miah interprets the experience of the sky more literally by exploring the color blue and pushing it to the farthest extents to which pigment can take the eye. To Miah the examination of color is an important element of the work as he breaks down the blue spectrum. The work invites observation, positioning viewers to appreciate subtleties from the artist’s perspective. The ways in which the artist treats his surfaces, accentuates painterly qualities. The confined space in this exhibition forces the observer to interact with each hanging shape’s intimate brushstrokes and glimpse the artist’s obsessive intentionality. While Miah deploys oil paint with his signature technique of paint dispersion on one side of the Dura-Lar, the gestural strokes in acrylic are a new medium for the artist and are used to generate the energetic visual field.

Miah’s poignant manipulation of place and space create a perfect and serene moment of meditation within Wave Hill’s idyllic setting. As a botanical garden and art space, Wave Hill offers a tranquil escape from its urban surroundings. Miah’s work expertly encapsulates this ideal by drawing on more than a decade of visitation to this space. Surprisingly he eschews botanical specifics, focusing instead on the overlooked, ever-unfolding tapestry of the sky. His choices of blue address the intangible nature of the sky while balancing the delicate physicality of his materials.

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