Nadine Christensen’s recent paintings are full of uncommon arrangements, precarious pileups that could just as easily indicate a game as a hazard. And while they’re void of figures, there sure are signs of people, each painting containing a clash of nature and the built environment. In one work we see this this collision epitomized by the bird hide that winds labyrinthine upon a scale-less landscape. With open walls and small slotted windows, the lean-to construction has no clear inside or outside, no exit point visible within the composition. It could be claustrophobic were it not so open, this attempt at containment within expansive space.
Christensen has long treated interior and exterior space as unbound, her paintings often containing buildings partially cut open to the sky or landscapes edged by the hint of a frame, prop or shadow. Windows and doors create transitional spaces in some earlier works, while mirrors or paintings-within-paintings allow for the jump cuts between interior and exterior picture planes in others. There’s a surreal quality to this experience of space, but, like a film set or video game environment, in Christensen’s compositions the unreal is built of elements that are rendered entirely believable.
The layering of multiple spatial zones disorientates and divides our attention. Christensen either lets things float, or pulls them forward or back by detailing surfaces or inserting framing cutout shapes as if making a collage. Toying with the logic of perspective in this way compounds the collision of spaces, casting background and close-up as irrelevant schematics. Instead, we take in the total image with a split-screen attention span, accepting the internal logic of disjointed elements sharing the board.
A combination of applications – rubbing, dripping, sponge and scratching – further layer and differentiate sections of the paintings. These treatments and Christensen’s range of painterly styles, from flat blocks of colour to intense detail, are all applied in varying speeds and reflect different tempos. Her hills and dirt piles have the look of a de-peopled Giotto landscape – the painter who first respected the flatness of the walls his frescos covered – while her treatment of the bird hide construction starts out as a sketchy outline in the foreground, worked up to convincing detail in the distance. In effect Christensen is generating not only multiple spatial planes, but also what critic David Joselit might describe as multiple time zones within the images.
As a motif, the bird hide is a continuation from an earlier series of works inspired by the remnant structures and markers of habitation left outdoors by unseen figures such as bird watchers, survivalists and the like – those trying to commune with nature. Now, more urban and industrial elements have also come into play with high fences, steel chain and besser blocks cutting a colder edge through Christensen’s landscapes.
A scene of abandoned architecture is the setting for two works that comprise the only interior paintings in the exhibition. Yet through cracks, cutout space and a dilapidated roof, the sky is everywhere. A bamboo tripod is silhouetted in the foreground of one – its shadow more solid than its flimsy reality. In this image the layers of pictorial space, registering in different spatial and temporal zones, disrupt an otherwise clear sense of depth as walls are reduced to colourfields and a cutout portion of sky floats to one side as if Magritte has been here. In the crumbling zone of these two paintings we seem to be squatting in a stasis between construction and demolition. The building is a ruin, a ghost; the stack of building blocks woefully inadequate.
*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and Station Gallery
