Eleanor Swordy

On view by appointment through February 25th.

In Eleanor Swordy’s Night Museum, 2010-2016, a reclining nude faces toward framed pictures hung salon style with a beam of light cutting across them. The figure is rendered in the same pictorial language as the works-within-the-work, making it unclear whether it is a depiction of a statue or a person. This well-muscled beau is a model of viewership.

Who, exactly, is in the gallery after dark? Swordy’s 2009 painting Monte en L’air depicts a cat burglar caught in the act of climbing over a red couch. In stealing art, the burglar is a particularly bourgeois vision of the criminal.

When one thinks of Artaud's identifying with a criminal, it’s probably a murderer or a rapist—someone who commits truly terrible acts, which makes the act of identification itself transgressive. But the burglar is often suave—think The Thomas Crown Affair or To Catch a Thief.

While Swordy’s paintings are figurative, what she chooses to paint is informed by her engagement with pattern and abstraction. In Night Museum, the pictures depicted on the wall once contained realized images, but she has chosen to efface her precise allusions to Bruegel, Guston, and Avery. She is robbing the viewers of the “masterpieces” she created, and, like the thief who leaves a calling card in the cracked safe, Swordy leaves a squiggle behind in each frame.

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Full Haus is also pleased to announce a new long-term installation at the gallery by Barak Zemer, Morning Glory