The Brooklyn Rail

In 1941, T.S. Eliot, in “The Dry Salvages,” book three of the Four Quartets, observed:

The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness.

Eighty-four years later, Chloe Wise translates Eliot’s bemusement about transcendent experiences into twelve dazzling oils on canvas. Is it possible to have an unmediated vision of experience? Is it possible to pierce the veil of knowledge, social formation, or language that turns all experiences into tired clichés? Philosophers (Edmund Husserl for example) thought they could, and coined the term “eidetic reduction” to describe the process by which the focused imagination could strip objects and, plausibly, experiences of contingency, revealing them in their essence.

Chloe Wise will have nothing to do with that combination of empiricism and mysticism, as the Joycean pun in the title of her show points out: all information is mis- or myth- information, since we inevitably translate all experience into words, thought and language being consubstantial. Jean-Jacques Rousseau pointed out this dilemma in his 1755 Discourse on Inequality: we live in a fictitious reality created by language, the famous “prison house” of language usually credited to Friedrich Nietzsche. Wise makes herself at home in that imaginary jail and decorates it in her own style for our delectation, so her pun contains a third layer. Mis could easily be miss or Ms.: self-inscription, a way of encoding the artist’s female identity into her work.

But myth in its etymological sense entails the mediation of language, stories, and narrative. Wise’s icons—here she eschews the sound work and sculptural pieces she’s deployed in the past to focus exclusively on painting—are populated by characters whose pictorial origins lie in Mannerism and the Baroque. To fathom her inexplicit allegories, we might bear in mind Bronzino’s An Allegory with Venus and Cupid (ca. 1545), with its mad proliferation of hands, feet, and swirling bodies. Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus (1601) also serves as a valuable point of reference, as Wise deploys his simultaneously diffused yet focused light and fluttering hands.

Wise’s characters—and where there are characters there is, inevitably, a narrative—are all in a high state of expectation: they are either waiting for some sort of illumination, or they have been illuminated and nervously hope to comprehend the experience. Numinous communion (2025), a large work measuring 72 by 60 inches, constitutes a summary of her techniques. The painting capitalizes on a Baroque whirlpool composition, with three female figures: two face us, while one turns her back. We may think of the three Marys, but these women seem to be members of some conclave who have entered into a kind of spiritual fusion, perhaps seeking to protect one another. Hair, hands, and mystery combine to generate an open-ended story: the central figure’s hair drifts over her face as she shelters the other two; the figure on the left looks frightened. We wonder what has transpired—have these women conjured the Devil? That is precisely the charm of Wise’s work. Like a novelist, she makes us want to know what’s going on in the minds of her characters, a fact especially true in this case, where one figure has her back to us, as if to conceal her identity.

Mystery in Wise’s work reaches its highest degree in a seemingly modest rectangular piece measuring 71 by 24 inches: Body Amnesia (2025). The title alludes to a specific mental condition, a disconnection between mind and body that in theory precludes the creation of memories. But here we have the disturbing image of a red-gloved hand about to plunge a knife into a loaf of bread resting on a jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise. The blade is turned toward the viewer and reflected in it is a female face: we have become characters in Wise’s oneiric composition.

The glove’s texture is matched by the Zurbaránian facture of the green curtain background—fabric being another of Wise’s obsessions, along with hands and shoes. But this gloved hand simply screams out for a psychoanalytic interpretation, since it evokes glove fetishism so powerfully. What can this icon represent? Is the bread an allusion to the Eucharist? Perhaps, but there is no wine present. Is it a metaphoric body about to be sacrificed or violated by that ominously phallic knife? To whom is this sacrifice being made? Some subdued Dionysiac deity who allows the private mutilation of a loaf of bread rather than the public destruction of a human body? So many questions, so few answers. And that is exactly what makes Chloe Wise’s work so successful: echoes of the old masters, suggested but never explicit stories or states of being. We may muse over these tremendous paintings forever without exhausting their mystery. We too will have the experience, and we too will miss the meaning.