The Brooklyn Rail

In Soumya Netrabile’s Shooting Star (2024), a woman stands alone at the front of an open, nocturnal landscape. The scene’s dark cypresses, its sloping fields, and the rustic homestead up the hill in the background suggest Tuscany, yet the entire painting is bathed in an ominous, dense, unfamiliar red tone. A woman in the foreground looks toward us expectantly. Her dress flutters in the breeze, and its cerulean fabric is the painting’s only departure from its palette of blood red and green-black. In the field behind her, another woman rushes back towards the horizon, dragging along a small child. Above, a bright white meteor arcs over the sky.

Shooting Star hangs in the opening room of Holding Current (all works 2024), Netrabile’s debut solo exhibition at Rachel Uffner. There’s a distinctly metaphysical air to the scene—not only because of its celestial aura, but also its raking shadows, its sense of superimposed, simultaneous time (are the two women the same or different people?), and its perspectival shiftiness. That red sky seems to suggest sunset at twilight, but it feels more like midnight. “Utopia” comes to mind, not in the sense of this being an idealized or “perfect” landscape, but for the word’s literal etymology: “no place.” Here Netrabile follows Giorgio de Chirico and others in striving to paint “that which cannot be seen.”

We might describe Netrabile’s work as exhibiting a kind of Romanticism, though Shooting Star is about as sublime and other-worldly as Netrabile gets. The show’s other paintings (which are all oil on canvas) contain more mundane subjects: a discarded letter caught in the weeds, a housecat caught in a tree, a caterpillar chewing a leaf, a kid poking a stick at a creek. Yet looking at these works en masse, one starts to think of Netrabile not as a painter of particular things so much as a constructor of environments. A press release text mentions Edvard Munch and Albert Pinkham Ryder as two precedents for Netrabile’s perennially on-the-move spaces, full of elliptical, unnameable forms that twist the eye about, animating the landscape as the active subject of her works. It’s difficult to discern where exactly we are. Some works suggest unkempt urban parks, some Great Plains farmland, and some jungle canopies. Still others combine all these into a single image.

Though Netrabile trends toward a high-burn palette of reds, greens, and yellows, the work in Rachel Uffner’s main gallery includes a wider range of colors, evoking different kinds of weather and times of day. In Nimrod and Esau, a square painting depicting two hunters crossing a wooded ridge, the artist has washed and scumbled cool pale tones over a still-visible white ground, giving air to what looks like an early spring scene, with its sparse and delicate suggestions of green foliage. Yet just to its right is Wild Donkey at Blackrock, composed almost entirely of colorful, mixed blacks, lending the image a jewel-like chromatic density that slows our read to a groping crawl.

Indeed, color in these works seems to function not so much for symbolic or descriptive purposes, but to open up or compress a space. The paint’s material physicality works in much the same way. In To the Beach, a high horizon line focuses our attention on the sandy dune at our feet, an incline of interlocking beige masses rendered with slathered-on color and scraped with a metal tool, revealing underlying layers. Yet despite the occasionally riotous and tangled energy of her subjects and compositions, there’s a surprising cool-headedness to Netrabile’s application of paint. As sensitive as these works are to a given mark’s material quality—its speed, opacity, moisture, weight, the density of its placement—Netrabile is rarely precious.

The press release explains that the show’s title, Holding Current, emerges from Netrabile’s training as an electrical engineer prior to becoming a painter. I’m more inclined to think about the ways that her works find forms and movements not through large, individual declarations, but through suggestive currents of smaller, coalescing calligraphies. Even when the paintings become quite large (the biggest reach six feet wide), Netrabile seems content to use the same small brushes, creating buzzing veils of color and streams of gesture that intersect, submerge, and sometimes eddy.

The best of these works take those movements and put them into productive tension with moments of stillness, which are often manifested by figurative elements. This allows the paintings to inhale and exhale, but also to hold their breath. Water tower, a very large rural scene involving a bored-looking boy and a flying crow in a wide open space, is perhaps the least boisterous of the paintings in the show, but its undercurrents, for that same reason, feel all the more mysterious.