The Brooklyn Rail

Many of Jodie Manasevit’s recent paintings are made up of units too self-contained to be called blotches or daubs of paint; yet they are often too imprecise to be called dots. Maybe they can live indeterminately as “spots,” areas that simply focus attention, places where things occur. They invade the fields of her canvases in an approximate order, loosely fitting into columns, strings, or braids. The longer these marks are held in focus, the more their patterns dissolve into and cancel each other out, until there is the sense that their placement comes out of a push and pull between conscious patternmaking and something more intuitive. In Snowblind (2024), the canvas is bisected: on its right side multicolor spots float on a white ground, while on its left, they are painted in a stark white against silver. For all their random activity suggesting snow flurries, Manasevit’s spots are not indifferent to the rectangle: they line up along the canvas’s edges as if snapping magnetically to a grid.

At Ghostmachine, Snowblind is hung on a temporary wall plastered in swathes of pink and pale green, which has been scraped and sanded down to a powdery state. Curator David Dixon constructed the walls in order to respond directly to Manasevit’s paintings, and their pigments run from pink to gray to green through the gallery, at times coyly interacting with corners and edges, but otherwise ignoring their architectural frame. Instead of leaving the sides of her canvases bare, Manasevit tapes them off a quarter inch over the edge, so the face of the painting just begins to spill over its surface. Noticing this, Dixon decided to inset a number of the paintings directly into the false walls, cutting precise holes in the sheetrock so the works hang almost flush, leaving only that small spillover still visible. The result is an intense interaction not only of colors, but also texture, as the soft quality of oil applied with brushes butts up against abraded plaster.

The first painting at the gallery’s entrance is Marooned (2025), a narrow purple canvas balanced by the gravity of a thin section of orange and green, which seems to have almost seeped out of the purple to rest on the canvas’s bottom edge. Marooned is set into a turbulent field of pale pink plaster, so there is a disorienting effect upon walking into the gallery: Dixon’s wall seems at first glance to be made of something much more porous, like crushed velvet, while the sheen of Manasevit’s painting begins to catch the light. The gulf in scale between Dixon’s marks in plaster and Manasevit’s precise handling of oil allows for a productive state of equilibrium, where it becomes possible to consider the paintings as discrete works within the installation. Several untitled works on paper expand Manasevit’s vocabulary of spots and dense fields of color, as in one ecstatic composition where a ring of yellow, blue, red, and black half circles float around the bottom of a lush field of orange and turquoise. Notice how the spots bleed out just a bit from the taped edge, and how that white border running up to the frame’s mat recalls the quarter inch of paint that rolls over the canvases’ edges.

At the center of the show’s constructed environment is a pair of paintings, On Balance 1 and 2 (both 2025), which are both broken into quadrants alternating between color and white. Along the vertical axis of On Balance 1 and the horizontal axis of On Balance 2, Manasevit has placed a braid of orange, yellow, crimson, and acid green, not so much breaking apart the austerity of the compositions, as momentarily revealing the spectrum between color choices. The play between vertical and horizontal as well as the segmenting of panels creates a feeling of rotation and carries any number of allusions, from windows and checkerboards to nautical flags. The two paintings are set into a deep gray portion of wall, a seam in the sheetrock between them. At the border, Dixon has scraped a bit of green and blue against the gray, like a glimpse of landscape beyond the wall.

That relationship between the paintings and the plaster carries significant weight. That the paintings are not only set into perfectly framed, recessed portions of the wall, but that they are the entire reason for the wall itself, informing another hand’s mark-making and color choices, speaks to their devotional power. When the eye scrolls across Dixon’s plaster construction to settle on another of Manasevit’s paintings, it’s hard not to call to mind the ruined spatial programs of Pompeiian frescoes, or the eccentric wall coverings of certain house museums. But there is no nostalgia here, only the sheer joy of suspended color.