Ella Kruglyanskaya

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In a series of canvases made over a year in Los Angeles spent largely in isolation, Ella Kruglyanskaya depicts the female figure in conflict with everything from the bounds of the frame, to the gaze of the viewer, to a lurid plaid pattern that emerges from the margins, threatening to overrun the scene with its mundane proliferation. Jockeying between “made” and “in the making,” Kruglyanskaya uses the tension between outsize trompe-l’oeil marks and those left by a flick of the brush to confound our sense of scale and composure. With a remarkable economy of gesture, she often creates fully-elaborated figures from a single swoosh. Like a jazz standard, a perfect triple lutz, or a joke, told so many times that its meaning is shared, known, pointless to elaborate, the “stuff ” of these paintings is found in their execution—one that, thankfully, is fetishized to no end. Their power however lies in Kruglyanskaya’s ability to use formal gestures to enact and reproduce the brutality of the male gaze directly, rather than “pointing at” or otherwise analyzing it. Like the old screenwriter’s adage “say don’t tell,” her paintings demonstrate the awful power of unsentimental, unapologetic commoditized sex. Because the viewer completes the picture, they make us complicit in it, too.

A woman glances furtively from repose, a would-be cozy scene were it not for her cruel foreshortening. A pair of diners relish a lobster dinner, their heads arbitrarily severed by the grips of a clipboard. A new wave duo ventures out for an evening, full of kinetic energy, their swinging fishnets and splashy trenchcoats oddly punctuated by a bolt of plaid. The lesson here is a hard one, with schadenfreude, and plenty of collateral damage. At a time of maddening ambiguity and hamfistedness, these pictures hit like an acme dumbbell, jolting awake dormant sensations and reminding us in equal measure of the pleasures and compromises that come with moving through the world in pumps and a clutch.