The Brooklyn Rail

With her newest exhibition of field paintings at Magenta Plains, Liza Lacroix focuses on a limited palette—the blacks, reds, browns, and grays of a cavernous eclipse—and achieves, with the most effective paintings on view, a palpable sense of depth. Lacroix’s forms mostly remain affixed to the brush-stroke, and thus the arm, in its rise-and-fall. But nested in onyx and charcoal-black foregrounds, garnet-mulberry red dashes and cider-clay virgule gatherings allow for more depth than the artist had previously achieved, even considering the fact that her earlier works, such as those shown in the same venue in 2022, made use of a much wider color palette. Lacroix’s newest works are more constrained, which licenses her to deepen the ambit of her formalist project, taking aim at the play of light and chiaroscuro as such.

All of the works in the exhibition were executed in 2024. Nine of them are oil on canvas, one is charcoal and graphite on laminated wood, and three are charcoal on Arches paper. All of Lacroix’s works optically hone in on a collection of marks that identify the location where light is consolidated in the composition—although, in the case of the charcoal works, negative space takes the place of the paintings’ umbrous shadows. Of the three works on paper, all Untitled, two collect graphite and charcoal markings along the center of the field. A related work, Looking forward to our next meeting is, in fact, Lacroix’s kitchen table, its reflective surface recording the marks left behind from her drawing practice. It is distinguished by a lower-right nexus of scattered pencil impressions and does not betray as proportionate and symmetric a uniformity as the other graphite and charcoal works. This allows it to exhibit a kind of “uniformity amidst variety” that sweeps our gaze towards the edges, a tightening-effect that provides a pleasurable counterbalance to the centrality of the other compositions.

The best works in the exhibition are those with the most surface depth, where the base expanse of Lacroix’s ground veers towards the infinite pitch of midnight darkness. With Enjoy the rest of your day and Untitled, Lacroix pools light along rounded strokes directed away from the center of the canvas. Using linseed oil, she thins out these ruptures of light, bringing them out from the surrounding scarlet- and ochre-bedaubed planes. In She enjoyed 2 deaths, the breadth of light is dramatized by a smoothed-over haze of yellow brushstrokes. In each work from this suite, the artist synthesizes an oblique light source with surrounding darkness. She is clearly depicting light sources as they would materialize in nature, despite the fact that no trees, mountains, or plains—indeed no recognizable objects at all—appear in the paintings. This lends her work to a kind of naturalism, albeit one that does not remain affixed to the natural semblance.

Lacroix’s interest in the quality of light takes its cue from developments in chiaroscuro that emerged during the end of the Quattrocento. In works like Leonardo da Vinci’s The Lady with an Ermine (ca. 1489–1491), the interplay of light and shadow is structured according to a unified “atmospheric” system, rather than keyed to the form of individual objects. While, in Lacroix’s work, illumination is detached from identifiable objects, its touch is, just as in Leonardo’s painting, common and consistent. Like Leonardo, Michelangelo, Signorelli, and other Florentine artists, Lacroix—particularly in works like I am talking about both AND the viewers—makes use of the naturalistic, blanketing action of light. This effect is absent, however, in the metallic amaranthine-haze of Untitled and When I read the titles, I thought Oh God., where Lacroix’s light source remains occluded, barring the brushstroke forms from coalescing into a unified pictorial field. This depreciates the possibility of the aforementioned optical “tightening-effect.” Elsewhere, however, Lacroix’s rendering of lighting sources projects naturalism to the foreground—one anchored in the suggestion of dimensionality and the possibility of landscapes—that renders her umbrous paintings particularly effective.

This aspect of Lacroix’s work recalls Immanuel Kant’s notorious observation in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, that “Nature was beautiful, if at the same time it looked like art; and art can only be called beautiful if we are aware that it is art and yet it looks to us like nature.” According to Kant, although artworks should express aesthetic ideas and not empirical concepts, they ought not remain altogether separated from the “look” of nature. Kant’s immediate antecedents like Charles Batteux developed the precedents for this idea, arguing that there must be a quality in the beautiful artwork that is natural, or mimetic, rather than contrived. In treating abstract strokes as a precipice for the play of light, Lacroix’s use of naturalistic illumination demonstrates a clever way of retaining naturalism without relying on nature as empirically observed. Of course, this is certainly not what a writer like Batteux had in mind—in his The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle (1746), Batteux argues that “painting imitates belle nature by means of colours” and that naturalistic “imitation is always the source of pleasure.” However, in the wake of modernism’s jettisoning verisimilitude, the artist who is attendant to naturalism must pursue strategies that do not simply look backwards, towards academicism or landscape painting. Indeed, Lacroix’s illuminated, cavernous works show that one can express belle nature, or art that “looks to us like nature,” without the presence of apparently empirical objects.