A Renaissance renaissance: Elise Ansel reinterprets the masters
Classic European paintings — Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo, with images of bacchanals, figures in the landscape, characters from myth, and scenes from Christian allegories — provide source material for Elise Ansel’s contemporary abstractions. Her reinterpretations of the original paintings simultaneously obscure them and provide a new way of seeing them. “I’ve always really loved Renaissance and early Renaissance masterpieces,” Ansel told Pasatiempo. “For a long time I had trouble finding a way to bridge this work with my practice as a contemporary artist. It was something I always wanted to do and finally came to a point where I thought OK, I’m going to take on these paintings. My approach was to focus on color, shape, and composition — that was the project I outlined for myself — but also to interpret them through gestural abstraction.” The Invisible Thread, an exhibition of Ansel’s paintings, is on view at Ellsworth Gallery.
