The Brooklyn Rail

Edge effects, or the frontier or liminal zones where habitats meet, also titles the two-venue solo exhibition by Jennifer Coates at CHART and High Noon Gallery. Places of flux, edge effects can be simple, as where a stream flows into a wetland, or complex—where a city displaces nature, for instance. Tension, fusion, resistance, and confusion: the processes of collision fascinate Coates. Conflict is the essence of drama, but edge effects render conflict problematic because in edge effect situations simple opposition between two forces fragments into a war of all against all. This is especially so when Coates factors in the human presence: pollution that intervenes in nature’s processes—natura naturans, or nature acting out its own processes, versus natura naturata, nature acted upon. In Coates’s work, all systems are in danger, either through conflict or through entropy. In this sense, her work enacts chaos theory, insinuating as it does that nature is composed of ever-changing modalities, though in this case human intervention seems to call the immortality of nature itself into question.

We might logically expect Coates’s works to be frenetic and wildly gestural or assume they derive from a classical landscape tradition, but neither are so—no frenzy and no homage to tradition are detected. Conventional landscape painting imposes geometric (human) structures like perspective, a vanishing point, the eye led along a path, perhaps to a spiritual illumination upon nature. Coates instead restrains perspective depth to present us with an event rather than a process. A stunning example is the large-scale painting Yew, Poppies, Leopards, Head of Dionysus, and Mud Puddling Butterflies (2023), a 60 by 72-inch acrylic and spray painted canvas. In the upper register of the canvas, the yew tree, a traditional symbol of death and resurrection, explodes in brilliant yellow. The yew was a key element in the Romantics’ exaltation of nature and a grand symbol of natural regeneration. In the lower register, Coates paints a bank of poppies, a flower linked to remembrance and to resurrection. So, both above and below, Coates incorporates symbols of rebirth and renewal. This connection is confirmed in a more modestly sized 16 by 20 inch work at High Noon, the smaller of the two galleries and a space congenial to an intimate viewing experience. By locating the brilliant, red-orange yew tree in a graveyard, in Yew and Graveyard (2024) she confirms the relationship between the yew and resurrection.

But what about those leopards? These predators signify a Greek mythological figure, Dionysus, whose presence Coates includes in several paintings. The thyrsus, the staff topped with a pinecone carried by Dionysus’s female followers, symbolizes humanity’s link to nature. The madness Dionysus imposes reminds us that we too derive from a nature not governed by human consciousness, a position underscored in another large canvas, Bacchanal (2024). The bacchantes, both male and female, are scattered helter-skelter across the canvas where they are surrounded by a riot of unnaturally colored plants, as well as the carcasses of sacrificial goats. Succumbing to Dionysus may dehumanize us and return us to natura naturans, but it is only a temporary solution to our fraught relationship with nature.

Throughout this show, Coates deploys a skein of patterns and repetitions, repeated motifs that allude to metamorphosis and destruction. Coates’s unity of style, however, would seem to be at odds with the professed politics of her work. A self-declared ecofeminist, Coates would like to incorporate her message into her paintings. But the recurring elements—predators, ruins, butterflies, nymphs, classical woodland deities like Pan, broken sculptures, and myriad birds—allude to an ancient symbolic code. Nature is not the human habitat, and society is the antithesis of nature, but Coates invents a domain where images of metamorphosis (Pan pursuing Syrinx, who metamorphoses into the reeds Pan uses to make music) invite us to embrace the cyclical processes of nature and to accept our own fragile mortality.

We see this synthesized in a magnificent 60 by 72-inch canvas at High Noon, Diana with Moths, Blindweed, Dead Pines, and Pinecones (2024). Coates’s Diana, seated demurely on the left, alludes to the nude model, also situated on the left in Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863), reminding us that all art is ultimately about art, no matter what the artist’s intentions may be. Coates’s Diana is enveloped in amazing color, but the rubble surrounding her—perhaps a ruin—the moths, and the pinecones all conspire to link Coates to a pastoral meditation on the fragility of life. She may well have taken a cue from Poussin’s seventeenth-century, tomb-laden pastoral, Et in Arcadia, ego (or, “I—Death—also dwell in the seemingly timeless realm of art”). Jennifer Coates teaches us a lesson about the world we inhabit and like Poussin she does so gently, in a pastoral mode.