Light Rhythms
September 14- October 7, 2023
Gallery Henoch
555 West 25th St. New York, NY
Light Rhythms
The day-to-day world can feel so small and muted, even in the most metropolitan place on the globe. Alexandra Pacula’s latest works—large-scale paintings with mesmerizing surges of color and vantage points that deliver a confounding sense of movement—sear away the dullness with a jolt, rousing us to the dynamism of New York City and the visual intensity of the cityscape writ large.
Stand before Pacula’s Shimmering Twilight and you start to understand how eloquent the language of light can be. The iconic Chrysler building illuminates the most recognizable skyline in the world with a geometric corona. Glittery dots and dashes look so full-bodied that you’re tempted to reach out and cup their glow in your hand. The painting is a revel of light. Every brilliant gleam feels like pure potential, pure happening—from 42nd and Lex all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. In Luminous Dusk, that same New York skyline seems poised to lift off—expanding ever upward and extending beyond its bounds in hypnotic counterpoint to the endless cobalt sky. Light and color are frozen in a moment and yet forever take flight.
The artist lets city life come further to the surface with Inside the Grid. Initially, the painting gives the impression of an anonymous snapshot. Only as the eye moves across the network of shadow and light do we realize that the vignettes on display are too detailed to be manufactured and obscured just enough to tantalize. It’s a cheeky nod to the delight of being an inadvertent voyeur, a role every city dweller can’t help but play from time to time.
Traces of movement carry us on. Forms streak by in a masterful articulation of flow in Linear Movement I and Vibrant City. Pacula shows this colossus of a city on the move and transports us across the sky right along with it. Urban Melody—fittingly titled with such a visual symphony on display—celebrates the rhythm of New York, as bright lights from the streets below float upward to dance and sway in midair.
Movement and light feel infinite in Pacula’s world. They come to personify the energy of the city itself. Their complex interplay, palpable in this latest body of work, reveals the power of place with color, gesture and impossible angles. Through the artist’s lens, we see in ways we can never truly see and discover the irrepressible, enigmatic spirit of this singular city. Simultaneously as that knowledge rises to the surface, something else starts to occur.
Standing in front of Pacula’s artwork, we begin to feel larger than life, as if we could harness the power of this place—so deftly depicted—for ourselves. In this, the mutuality of city and humanity comes full circle. Always exhilarating, the relationship nevertheless carries with it the frisson of knowledge that, in our desire to conquer we may be conquered ourselves—pulled in, pushed under and forever changed. Therein lies the undeniable lure of New York City, the complexity of which Pacula captures with a style and vitality that have become her signature.
Courtney Jordan