Christina Quarles: Come In From An Endless Place

The figure paintings on view in Christina Quarles’s exhibition of new work at Hauser & Wirth are like nothing you’ve seen before. In them, arching curves sweep, spin, fall, and rise in what seem like single gestures, so it is startling to realize that those lyrically abstract lines actually limn the contours of distended and knotted arms, legs, torsos, buttocks, breasts, and heads. They come into focus like an aftereffect, and for all their abstract qualities convey bodily desire as urgent as it is unflinching.

Quarles’s visual eloquence reflects the simultaneity within which she has lived since her birth, in 1985. A child of a white mother and a Black father, she came to identify as a Black cisgender queer woman. Yet her light skin has often served as a limit marker, which tends to fix her identity as white. She has described how the tensions arising from how she is viewed generate the formal dislocations and discontinuities that the refusals of her works take, and are a core theme of her art. She is classically trained, and her studio practice is grounded in figure drawing, but for her the figure is ambiguous and multiple, bounded, extended, flattened and volumetric, felt rather than merely observed.

(And Tell Me Today’s Not Today) (all works 2023) presents a Rorschach-like split image of a crouching body organized around a painted and dripped vertical demarcation that is transformed into a vertical cut of raw canvas within the black right triangle at the lower edge. From this split image, forearms and hands burst in opposing directions. In a reverse rhyme, the elegant curves of two forearms give way to the charged tactility of tentatively touching forefingers, a riff on Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. The painting also conveys two kinds of space: inside—vaginal opening, cervical tube, surrounding labia, ribs—and outside: breasts, buttocks, and facial features washed in wet-in-wet applications, grisaille-like in their Veil-of-Veronica superimposition over a silhouetted profile. Other hands, dripping, pointed, spiked, and brushed, contrast with the grace of an extended single arm at top center, stretching right to left in undulations that accommodate the bulging fingers beneath. Quarles surprises with the endpoint of this arm, an enlarged hand whose distended figures drape over the concentric rings of innards. It is colored in a harlequinesque-patterned patchwork of purple, pink, blue, green, and yellow, shot through with indirect references that enrich the image: the pattern recalls the jester, the trickster who masks identity by wearing a decorative disguise.

The doubling and trebling of Quarles’s figures reiterate her process. Images are drawn on canvas, photographed, digitally manipulated, and then uploaded to Adobe Illustrator, where, in counterpoint to the elegance and fluidity of her figure drawing, Quarles embeds patterned planes—backdrops, supports, internal frames, frames within frames, disruptive striations—that surround, bind, cage, or slice limbs and torsos. She then transcribes these digital images onto the surface of the paintings, on which the paint can be slathered, brushed dry, or overlaid with layers of paint. So, for example, the checkered blanket in Lift Yew Up, I Wanna Lift Yew Up I Wanna, captures the striated traces of Quarles’s handheld dry brush or comb, while the torso and legs of the central figure are masked out in vinyl and overlaid with small individually painted diamonds. Elsewhere Quarles uses Flashe vinyl paint, thickly applied or combed through in rivulets, to achieve a luminous matte finish. Identifying where the collaged effect of paint begins and ends becomes yet another “gotcha” game in Quarles’s playful approach to trompe l’oeil.

Cherry Moon (Just As Tha Darkness Got Very Dark), one of the most ominous works in the show, contains a number of dazzling juxtapositions. The fluidly rendered stacked bodies on the left, led by a large kneeling figure, are played against a single leaning figure on the right, which is firmly planted within a stable archway. The hands of the large figure on the left seem simultaneously to reach out and draw back, in response to the outstretched hands of the figure on the right. It takes a few moments to realize that these two figures share a single head. Throughout this unforgettable image fluidity and stability are set against each other in a grave and mercurial dialogue, in which the differences between figure and doppelgänger are both stated and denied. Whether contrasting two bodies or splitting a single one, Cherry Moon proposes a dynamic opposition, made all the more vivid by the stability of the stone-faced archway even as the “darkness” of the title, in the form of a black diagonal plane, both unites and cuts the two bodies asunder. The angled planes in paintings such as this stage divisions of surface as literal cuts and obstructions—barriers and restraints—while the expanses of raw canvas convey a material openness and luminosity that seem to solicit the viewer to imaginatively fill in the scene.

Though Quarles’s sweeping forms emerge as recognizable figures, they resist easy legibility—part of what is so captivating about these extraordinary paintings—along with the “now you see it, now you don’t” trickery of trompe l'oeil. We untangle the loops and bends of their softly shaded contours and the bewildering surfaces that swell with translucent colors, only to find that we are doubly tricked. For Quarles’s visual punning is a two-way relay, a mirror image of our equally multiplied selves. Like her full-body portraits, we too are labyrinths of desire and repulsion, and intimacy and disconnection, all entwining and splitting as singular physical beings containing multitudes.

What we see in Quarles’s images—and what her images reflect—are bodies that are never whole, subjectivities that are never singular, and spaces that are neither truly bound nor immovably situated, but rather are at once “endless,” convulsed, and weighted. In that they thwart closure, they also present the protean condition of lived experience.