Hpgrp GALLERY NY is pleased to announce an exhibition of the paintings of　noted artist Margaret Evangeline. The exhibition " I Feel It in My Bones "　will take place at the gallery from July 8 to August 15 2009.

Margaret Evangeline’s exhibition “I Feel It in My Bones” at Hpgrp GALLERY NY contains paintings on canvas completed over the　past two years. The artist recalls in her statement various influences among them being in London for her River Thames installation when Lehman Brothers collapses, the impact of a visit to the Hubble Project, the death of artist Grace Hartigan, and the impact these influences have had on her return to oil paint on canvas. Included in this exhibition are the new painting "A Migration of Monarchs" (2009) and paintings from the "Magic Spells" series of 2008, the "West Village Garden" series (2008), and "Bones", (2008), works shown December 2008- May 2009 in New Orleans’ Ogden Museum of Southern Art as part of a large survey show of Evangeline’s work from the early eighties until now. In all of their luminous and spindly variety, these paintings are dazzling and measured in their coloristic sensuousness. 

The hallmark of all high cultural achievement is its unpredictability and vibrancy, its sense of estrangement, even of itself. At the center of Margaret Evangeline’s aesthetic is the sensation that the work, in its diverse formal characteristics such as color, differing use of volumes, patterns, textures and various markmaking devices, is mindful of addressing how things connect, how they absorb, dissolve, take the place of. Supersession is a key element in the work as a whole. One can detect an ongoing set of internalized visits and studio chats that Margaret Evangeline has been having with Gustav Klimt, Antoni Gaudi, Philip Guston, Mary Heilmann, Brice Marden, Raoul de Keyser, Terry Winters. Keeping company with such guests indicates the artist's attraction to organic systems that are porous, interconnected and frayed. Evangeline has said, " it's erotic, this desire for what you don't know, you are an outlier, spinning sensually with what you do know and don't know, looking for equilibrium…" Evangeline's worlds re-imagine the science and poetry of decay and growth, creating what she terms "erotic uncertainties" that arise when a singular circumstance has been exploded into multiple components, each part competing for dominance.
Margaret Evangeline’s imagery bears down on the twin feelings of sadness and of celebration to induce what the Elizabethan philosopher Francis Bacon in his day termed “…an excellent beauty” which can only be abetted by “… some strangeness of proportion.”

Copies of the essay "The Bones, They Do Chatter" written expressly for the Evangeline exhibition at HPGRP Gallery by critic Dominique Nahas will be available to the public at the gallery.

By Dominique Nahas © 2009 Dominique Nahas is an independent curator and critic based in New York City. He is teaches critical studies at Pratt Institute where he is an associate professor in the fine arts department. He is a critique faculty member of The New York Studio Program. He is the 2009-10 critic in residence at Maryland Institute College of Art’s Hoffberger Graduate School.

A Feeling in Your Bones; Grace, Science and Art

 You are feeling a sense of spiritual dislocation this past fall when you are in London, launch a floating monument in the River Thames called "Saved From Drowning". While you are constructing it at the Royal Docks, in view of Lehman Brothers, Lehman falls. The digital ticker tape traveling around the building has all down-pointing arrows, the young men and women of Lehman are filling the pubs outside the building.  You watch from your hotel window and you see American Airlines install a giant bubble on the plaza with someone inside it sleeping on a fold-out seat and torn bits of paper whirling around in it like snow, and you are confused because the sleeper in it is alive in this huge American Airlines bubble, because this is the day that the huge American financial bubble has burst with all of us seemingly asleep in it.

The spiritual dislocation you've been feeling becomes a purposeful swarm, a feeling in your bones, sensations in your head and heart wanting to be shaped.  Poetry is now inevitable, not ideas, but poetry, with paint as the keenest arrow in your quiver of languages.

Like other artists, including Picasso, you go through periods. You sometimes leave and return to paint, even when you're shooting through steel you are a painter.  Then your friend, the beautiful painter, Grace Hartigan dies. You've unconditionally loved her and the sharp-witted, bawdy discourses and now you remember everything, how she calls you from her last days in the hospital to say goodbye and says instead, ". remember, stainless steel sinks…" and laughs heartily. You miss her a lot. With her gone, no one will understand paint and poetry in the living world quite that way...and you love her not just because she loves your shot stainless steel paintings and then tells you before your Thames installation that stainless steel sinks, not just because she writes to you and tells you, "you need to put a little sliver of ice in your heart,"  but because she understands words the way a poet does, knows that words spill out onto a piece of white paper in an unpredictable way that she trusts. Paint does that for her too. She never claims to be a poet, she is happy to have been muse to a poet, whose autobiographical epitaph reads "Grace/to be born and live as variously as possible."

Your last visit to Grace's Baltimore studio, you notice her walker is covered with paint. 

 Not everyone loves paint, staying up late with it into the night, but Grace regards painting with respect, because it exists not for ideas or for commerce or for anything but for  trying to understand the world and what it is to be human in it. To live for that is to be something of an outlier… like the first painter, the cave painter of the eloquent long-necked horses (who could ever paint a better horse? not even da Vinci…) because then there was no split between science and art, this was the discovery of science and the discovery as art. Even today both end up giving you a way to enter and to live in the world, though both can be met with hostility and skepticism.

You visit Baltimore and the Hubble project at Johns Hopkins University. It's after November and you think of Grace, because now she is gone and now you recall that she met and fell immediately in love with a scientist. She leaves New York City for Baltimore and leaves poet Frank O'Hara, to become a scientist's muse.

 And it makes your heart race, sitting in the dark, hearing an astronomer describe the sky, and you see that to always be in search of what you don't yet know is common ground with painters, poets, scientists…it's erotic, this desire for what you don't know, to be spinning sensually outside of it with what you do know and don't know, looking for equilibrium….

Grace lived dangerously with this reeling until she chose sobriety so she could go on painting…there is a tragic ending with her scientist, and with her poet, Frank O'Hara...but these are other stories. They are in her paint. Her own ending is not tragic, it's a triumph over disbelief.

It's your job to feel this year's shifting terrain, this process of confusion, and you with your very modest science literacy love the writings of Oliver Sacks and Stephen Hawkins and the Hubble Project because they give you the erotic itch for what has to be shaped out of uncertainty. You are called to a particular body of work, to search out meaningful patterns late into the night.

Your notes for a statement become a text in praise of yearning, in praise of the stages of uncertainties that guide you to illuminate what lies just outside your reach. And you reach, not in ignorance but in doubt, not with ideas, but with paint. Paint is the object, even when you love this new century for its genome theories and a biotechnology of reproduction that widens and deepens your sense of the human body because for you, paint is the body. Oil paint IS the fresh body that you spill out into new habitats. This is not nature but your investigation of nature, images to be caressed until they embody a sense of place within the erotica of the unknown.

Margaret Evangeline at hpgrp gallery New York

By Dominique Nahas © 2009

Every painting contains a narrative, a conversation leading to something that is embedded in visual language and yet is separate from it as well. Narrative content need not be contained or vested within an overt storyline, a chain of events leading to a suggested conclusion or indicated resolution. Every painting in a certain sense carries within it the narration of its own process. It bears testimony to its own conditionality and its own facticity. Sometimes there is an added bonus: an intriguing suggestion of character development or a clash of personalities that can appeal to the eye as well as to the brain. Such is the case in Margaret Evangeline’s works. She creates supreme fictions (up is down, down is up, in is out, out is in, unraveling entanglements, terminal infinities) that are highly controlled and highly inventive. Her abstract forms appear like leading men and women performing their parts seamlessly and transparently. The best acting is invisible; Evangeline’s image making appears unscripted, spontaneous creations that are freshly unruly, coolly insolent.  These supposedly unrehearsed visual events can be seen as corrupted visual narratives, in which contrapuntal rhythmic universes coalesce and grate in uneasy abandon. About the work of Margaret Evangeline there remains an irresistible, an undeniable reality: it is charged with both tremulousness ferocity and litheness. These flittering, negotiating opposites appear at first to be unsustainable. They linger, nevertheless, far beyond the presumed realm of possibility in the mind’s eye, in one’s off-beat yet insistent peripheral mental vision.

Evangeline’s exhibition “I Feel It in My Bones” at HPGRP contains seven large works from different bodies of works of oil on canvas, completed over the past two years. These include the works from the Magic Spells series (2008), the West Village Garden series (2008) and paintings such as A Migration of Monarchs(2009)  and XO,Marilyn (2008). Some of these were  works shown in the first half of 2009 in New Orleans’ Ogden Museum of Southern Art as part of a large survey show of Evangeline’s work since the early eighties. Such works, in all of their variety, are energetic and measured in their gutteral sensitivity. In looking at these works I can detect an ongoing set of internalized visits and studio chats that Margaret Evangeline has been having with Gustav Klimt, Antoni Gaudi, Philip Guston, Mary Heilman, Brice Marden, Raoul de Keyser, Terry Winters. Keeping company with such guests indicates to me that the artist revels in alluding to organic systems that are porous, interconnected and frayed. Evangeline’s worlds are imaginative re-imaginings in which decay and growth create spaces that arise when a singular circumstance has been exploded into multiple components, each part competing for dominance. What takes gripping possession within the pictorial spaces of Evangeline’s canvases are sensations bearing down on twin feelings of sadness and of celebration inducing what the Elizabethan philosopher Francis Bacon in his day termed “…an excellent beauty” which can only be abetted by “… some strangeness of proportion.”  Evangeline’s abstractions are strangely riveting; their unexpected formats contain expressive phrasings through delicate drips while simultaneously attending to marks that are nonchalantly jocular and bouncy yet with a strain of morbidity and demonic drive. Such efforts are hauntingly and often strikingly chilling and bracing. Often these works begin with quiet undertones, with a splattering of finely articulated lines and a drizzles of light –induced splatterings as in XO Marilyn which contrast sharply with the ferocious guttural outbursts of distinctive geometrically ordered forms such as squares or rectangles as well as with braided or twisted loops or cords of paint that are the major players in the Magic Spells works.

In the Magic Spells series particularly linear tentativeness and certainty have been mobilized to produce visual tension that suggests a condition that is raw and elemental. That same tension serves to draw attention to a situation that seems terminally, yet wondrously at the verge of dissolution. Such works are layered, as excavations that allude to beginnings and ends, to non-finito and to certain nourishing darknesses. The artist’s works appear at first to consist of spun abstractions that sustain themselves through an energetics that defy reason or logic. The Magic Spells paintings have an apparitional quality that suggest an interplay between haunting presentiments of absence and of presence.  An hallucinatory exuberance for example pervades Magic Spells 11 in which the inference of ladders, balls of string, twine, rope, letter formations create a satisfying narrative read as do the five gold balls/orbs suspended or levitating in a field of idiosyncratic yet constructed marks. The configurations in Magic Spells 20, for example, reiterate intensely physicalized, bundled braided, and looped gestures. These linear systems are co-extensive as interchangeability predominates within scaffolded units, superimposed armatured grids, enlaced latticed networks.