CATHY WILKES at Ortuzar Projects, September 9 – October 2, 2022

Cathy Wilkes’ show at Ortuzar Projects (New York, NY, through October 2, 2022) operates through the charged relationship between a group of paintings – hung low, at eye level for toddlers or dogs – and a central papier mache figure. On the floor beside some of the paintings are kitchen items: a cylinder of salt, a shallow glass bowl and chalice. The paintings are made on grounds of soft, woven unprimed cotton. Pigment absorbs into these grounds like pools of oil, sweat or makeup sinking into a tablecloth or t-shirt. The faint marks left behind form abstract compositions, which feel like weather or idiosyncratic maps. These works are stains of vision, almost painfully reticent, like the recollections of someone who has intentionally blurred their senses. 

The papier mache figure seems precarious: tall and slight, missing one leg, arms outstretched with open palms. Through the gaping hole of its pant leg, though, a metal rod is visible, as if it is supported by one long spine – a simplified skeleton, all nerve, suited for stillness, for pain, for lasting. The proximity of the figure to one of the slim columns marking the central axis of the space, sets up a series of geometric analogies: figure is to column as salt and chalice are to painting. The figure is architectural, an element of public space, while the paintings evoke a hushed, spare interiority. 

Personal effects of the artist, including a passage from the New Testament written in a child’s careful, rounded script, are displayed in glass cases. These objects, along with the artist’s writing (included in the press release), solidify the context of the show: Wilkes’ youth in Belfast during The Troubles. In this light, the map-like compositions of the paintings allude to barricades or “peace walls,” and the vessels beside them take on religious as well as domestic resonance. Wilkes writes, in a shocking indictment of herself as a child: “…I was the oppressor, how could I be the liberator?” This refrain characterizes Wilkes’ engagement with the split traumatic afterlife of her exposure to violence. Through a piercing poetry she mingles the conflicting psychic states of her individual and national trauma – childhood piety and fear making way for adult grief