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Linda Griggs & Allen Hansen
Linda Griggs
Griggs’ seemingly unforgiving realism betrays a formalist obsession with painted color and linear design at arm’s length from the real world. Her world is a garishly lit stage set, imagined one test shot at a time, devoid yet suggesting the unavoidable trespasses and clumsy human affairs we mistake for real life.
My work examines images of places and memories that offered tranquility as a balm against images of loss from the Pandemic, entrenched police racism, and the destruction of historic NYC sacred spaces and parks as the result of surging real estate greed.
Among those comforting places was our public pool. Every age, race, ability and class from the Lower East Side was represented. Looking at these paintings my friend Frank Walsh commented, “The Public Pool is a great indicator of a civil society.” Later when we were able to travel my sister’s backyard pool, glowing at night, was also beautiful to me. There are no people in the water which some fairly assess as a reaction to the loss of human contact during the pandemic but it is illegal to take photos of swimmers in the public pool and for me undisturbed water is tranquilizing.
Black walnut ink, watercolor pencil, black walnut ink with water mixable oil, oil, and selective varnish on canvas
42 x 62 inches, 2024
Oil on canvas, selective varnish
48 x 56 inches, 2023
Allen Hansen
Hansen shares Griggs’ fetish for waking dreams and similarly toys with mood and melancholy, dark pools, and murky undertows. If Griggs is a formalist posing as a realist, Hansen is the extreme close-up of a closeted narrative painter switching on the overhead to spy on deliciously shadowy goings-on rivaling creationist conspiracies and Hitchcock noirs.
Allen Hansen’s abstractions have emerged out of his work in the neo-romantic landscape traditions; he continues to use a fictitious light source that evokes an affinity to the real and a dialogue that references time, place, and memory. The new work reduces complexities to their most elemental in order to reference a sensory geography.
In this imagined geography, his newest work includes indeterminate geometries, coils and spirals, unraveling and universal in its symbolism.
