Wheels of Birds
by Dana Kinstler
In Luminous Flux, at Cadogan Gallery in Milan, Elise Ansel presents 14 radiant, glowing paintings evenly divided into two sets of sevens: the Woman in Blue series inspired by Johannes Vermeer’s Woman Reading a Letter (c.1663) and the Woman in Red paintings which spring from Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints and Donor also known as the Cornbury Park altarpiece (1505). The paintings of each color vary in size and lined up feel like a devotion to chroma and paint. Ansel entwines a love for painting with a deep reverence for narrative and melds these forms together in a complex, innovative dialogue between her paintings and those by the Old Masters. She opens up possibilities, in little explosions of color and brushwork.
Each painting in the series— Ansel calls them “iterations”—are variations, like Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” in which each section plays off the last one in a seamless but changed style, using slightly different notes and tempos which create distinct pieces yet are still connected to each other within the body of the work. Like Monet, who painted his Haystacks and the Cathedral at Rouen multiple times at different times of day, trying to capture the light as it changed, she unveils and illuminates with her iterative abstractions.
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