Maddy Parrasch & Emma Soucek

Maddy Parrasch and Emma Soucek did in fact finish one another’s sentences, but that phrase trivializes one of the best art romances I’ve seen firsthand: they also finished one another’s paintings and started one another’s thoughts. They contributed physical material, imagery, inspiration, criticism, advocacy, and confidence to one another’s work. They traveled together, borrowed from one another and from the rest of their extraordinary group of friends, and shared pretty much everything, pooling experiences to maximize returns. The last time they were physically together, they interviewed one another. How many artists get to know, even for a while, the perfect member of their audience? Maddy posted a hand-written text drawing on Instagram: “Dearest Emma, I hope you blow up.” This two-person show evolved directly from that sentiment.

The work here all speaks to a desire to compress material, image, surface, ground, and support into a unified image-object. Emma and Maddy, visiting Assisi and Padua in 2016, recognized Giotto’s frescos as a realization of that shared aspiration. They go about it differently, but this desire led both artists towards making paintings without paint, and the results are simultaneously minimal and maximal, heavy and light, corporeal and ephemeral, elegant and abject. In Maddy’s works the impulse plays out in experimentation with ceramic glazes, 3D and UV printing, monoprints, and other solutions to the problem of how to inextricably fuse a picture into material, rather than laying it on top. Emma’s paper pulp paintings meld color, drawing, and scraps of reference into vast constellations of deliberately macerated content. The work attests to an idea of authenticity that doesn’t preclude self-awareness, humor, or even self-deprecation. It seems to appeal to an idea of soulfulness that, rather than presuming to situate itself in some rarified elsewhere, instead revels in the moment and place of the work’s making (often the studio floor). Soft geometry, dissolving grids, and broken diagonals ricochet between Maddy’s works and Emma’s, contributing to a sense of mutual belief in the interdependency of the sacred and the profane. The descriptive, almost diagrammatic linear images in Maddy’s artist-framed grids of monoprints ground us in their socially inscribed and physically embodied situation (and remind us of our own), as do the legible collage elements (fragments from drawings, the artworks of friends and role models, and souvenirs and ephemera from her life) that are recorded being pressed, fingertip by fingertip, into Emma’s pulps.

In capturing this material, the works serve as reliquaries, but rather than a fiction of permanence and fixity they offer a view of our memories and strategies for preservation as fragile, brittle, and always in flux. Maddy, who first started college as an archaeology major, talked and wrote about excavation and its connection to ceramics. She described her works as “clues to trace a broken train of thought,” and the way this phrase tasks both artist and viewer with digging up, sifting through, piecing together, and continually reassembling fragments of meaning seems equally applicable to Emma’s work.

Memories of Maddy figure centrally in the intimate train of thought we trace through Emma’s newest works, and anyone could be forgiven for wanting to turn this show into an elegy, but that’s not the real mode of either artist’s work: there’s no one narrative, and certainly no summation. Yes, this show connects us to a heartbreaking story about two young artist-friends who loved and contributed profoundly to one another’s work, but the vigor, exuberance, and emotional range of the actual objects in the gallery demand we not be satisfied with that conclusion, or any other. Please, look.

- Kevin Zucker, RISD Painting Faculty

Maddy Parrasch (1995-2018) and Emma Soucek (b.1996, lives and works in Brooklyn) both recently finished their BFA programs at the Rhode Island School of Design. This is the first New York gallery presentation of either of their work.