The Brooklyn Rail

Celebrated for her haunting compositions of contortionist figures whose legs, arms, buttocks, and boobs hang, flail, distend, and coil against raucous chromatic planar patterns, Christina Quarles, assisted by curator Sara Hatla Krogsgaard, has achieved a tour de force at Copenhagen’s Gammel Strand. The show’s title, In the Shadow of Burning Light, was lifted from a work on paper that depicts three figures top-lit by scalding neon-pink light. Hands clasped to their faces, their torsos cut through by an ink-black horizontal plane, they sit in silent mourning. Just as light produces shadow, so Quarles extended this paradox of darkness persisting in light to the entire exhibition. She was inspired by the space, where front-facing windows on all four floors permit the singular bright light of northern Europe to stream into the galleries along with roving shadows, alternately darkening and illuminating the thirty paintings and drawings on view. Beyond the sympathetic twinning of natural lighting conditions and the oppositions of light and dark within her canvases, Quarles backed and offset her paintings by papering the space with lavender wallpaper run through with diagonal bands that are stenciled in blossom shapes, five petals tipped in shadow. Thrown shadows amplify the visual throughline of the exhibition while nodding to the domestic setting of this eighteenth-century townhouse to exhilarating effect.

A cis-gendered queer woman born to a Black father and a white mother, Quarles is, as she says, “multiply situated.” Her selves strive toward interconnectedness, an intimacy that might bring about resolution. She sequences her figures over the canvas like stop-action photographs of bodies intertwined, layered, and interconnected. While Quarles’s own Blackness is masked by her fair skin, her painted figures are racialized by her use of colors lying between black and white—grays, purples, blues, yellows, and pinks, like so much fluid from internal ruptures oozing under the skin. Reading as neither black nor white, her figures often appear in shades of gray, blue, and mauve—as shadows within light. And just as Quarles’s queerness is marginalized by heterosexual social norms, the sexuality of her figures is also obscured by overlapping limbs and bulging torsos. The self, seen and unseen, is Quarles’s lived paradox, made explicit in labyrinths of distended limbs arching and clutching in physical intimacy yet rent by orthogonal planes that sever limbs from torsos—horrific transgressions depicted, for example, in works such as A Lull Gone By (2021) and Cherry Moon (Just As Tha Darkness Got Very Dark) (2023).

Quarles lays down her figures in sweeping freehand brushstrokes. She has no a priori plan, making her initial gestural marks on bare canvas as opening gambits—perhaps a torso, a hand, a foot, a boob, or a buttock—which she counters intuitively, slowly building her figures from an accumulation of abstract gestural markings. She then photographs the completed forms and imports the resulting images into the computer program Adobe Illustrator, where she uses a trackpad to work out background patterns, and other details such as hair, at small scale onscreen. A vinyl plotter cuts stencils at “physical shoulder scale,” which she tapes onto her canvas, paints over, through, and around, and then removes.¹ Eye-popping planes overlap, intersect, and fold to suggest volumetric environments within which her figures interact.

Situated amid a counterpoint of tangled limbs and the cacophony of chromatic patterns, Quarles’s faces appear motionless, haunted, and plangent. Their smudged features and veiled, clouded expressions, covered by hands or cradled in arms, transfix this viewer. Quarles has said that she’s “interested in portraiture occupying the space of being within your body and looking out.”² She reverses the spectatorial gaze, training expressions of loss and denial onto the viewer: “I usually feel there is more a sense of mourning in the work. I usually tap into that place of grief or mourning. That is where I start from, and it creates a need for moments of comfort. I am interested in these very intense moments happening in the painting.”³ The nearly featureless visages in paintings such as Too Hot to Hoot (2023) and Wrestlin’ (2023), the refusals in the closed eyes of All I Need Is the Air That I Breathe (2020), and the vacuous stares in Are Yew with Me Now? (2022) signal Quarles’s struggle to reconcile her multiple identities.

In 2021, Quarles made thirty-six line drawings, each carrying a phrase from W.E.B. Du Bois’s deeply personal essay “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” (1903).⁴ Relating a moment in his youth when “the shadow [of difference] swept across me,”⁵ Du Bois goes on to describe the effects of bearing a “double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”⁶ While Quarles acknowledges a similar sense of multiple selves, she bears down on others’ gazes from a position of refusal that is dramatized by her veiled faces, which she renders nearly illegible in accumulations of paint, scratches, and smears.⁷ Wary, vacuous, and unnerved, her visages are portraits of abjection. A Song For You (2022) makes the point: the faces are blank, the eyes closed, covered, or looking off into formless depth. Even the Baconesque head jutting out from behind a scrim of yellow and blue striations, grimacing through a wash of paint, its smeared features dripping residue through bare canvas like a punctured wound, reinforces this sense of abjection.

Just as Quarles’s figures represent bodily excess, so her punning titles signal an excess of meaning. Her works are troubling because her figures are convulsed in emotional and psychic disarray. Bursts of color, a mélange of shapes, and an assortment of textures draw us in even as they frustrate immediate recognition. Yet at Gammel Strand, Quarles has orchestrated an environment for her work that leads to sustained and thoughtful looking. Through shadow and light one discovers that with Quarles’s masterful depictions, empathy is the surest key to legibility.