Commentary
Art teaches us through example, as object lessons that instruct us in how a wordless impulse can become incarnate, nurtured and brooded over until it emerges as an independent reality. The necessity for not-knowing required of the artist may be acted out in silence or in rage. But even when the original, inchoate impetus is realized, it retains some of that mystery as its birthright.
In Eileen Senner’s art, this sense of emergence is made visible in forms that glow in a surrounding darkness. Like fragments of ancient statuary, these human forms have the dignity of ruins. But these torsos, these bleached lost bodies are translucent and filled with light. Bereft of heads and limbs, they have been separated from their identities, as well.
But each torso has a distinct, variegated surface, with markings at a deeper level becoming visible. These can resemble veins, or schematic images, or letter forms. Like a star or moon, each torso makes itself known by emitting a particular kind of light, with its own color and intensity. All of these distinguishing qualities endow the forms with both a sense of animation and of consciousness, as if memory had been transmuted into something tangible, and then written on the body. The effect is of seeing a scan or x-ray of a state that is simultaneously body and soul, more virtual than physical. Waiting like a embryo or a spirit in the netherworld, it pulses in anticipation.
Senner creates her paintings with layers of oil glazes, sanded, and slowly reworked. The surface blooms with mottled color, developing streaks or broken patterns, like stones or skin. Senner’s technique allows these incidents to arise spontaneously, seemingly lit from within. This approach, at once strong and subtle, achieves a quasi- photographic reality. The fine-grained image seems to float just beyond the picture plane, suspended in its own atmosphere. Lambent vessels, the torsos are like lamps crowded by the blackness, making an illuminated space of their own.
These images have a palpable feeling of life to them, and like any living thing carry within them a vast unknown. They suggest that we emerge from darkness, that we pass into darkness, and between these two nights we are filled with light. And that to be lost and then to realize the nature of that darkness and that light is the human work we do to truly become ourselves.
– John Mendelsohn
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