Alexandra Noel

Barbati Gallery is pleased to present Alexandra Noel’s new solo exhibition, Due, for the first time in Venice in the spaces of Palazzo Lezze on Campo Santo Stefano.

Imagine Twister era Helen Hunt telling you that it’s all about finding what’s in between an idea and a decision and encasing it there forever. Her voice is steady even if there are large objects circling around the two of you, insane things like a horse, a willow tree, a semi truck. Entranced by her cool, you surrender your ingrained hysterics. It turns out the encased thing may or may not actually be encased, but it’s certainly dense and compressed, formed by a kind of reverse atomization. I would say that Allie’s paintings, like a bouillon cube, dissipate and reveal themselves in the soup of your mind. The fluid becomes cloudy and then within these clouds, discrete formations move in and out of holding a clear image.

I have a distinct sensation in my body where these rectangles seem to lodge before they dissipate. It’s below the throat but still well above the abdomen. The zone of unsettled acid, of involuntary reflux. But really, it’s more pathology than process, a compulsion that’s inherent to the bulimic, consume everything but keep nothing down. Nevertheless, this is a sober affair, flinty in a dust to dust sense even though it has psychedelic qualities. Not like Pucci, or even Giordano Bruno’s eucharist, but the normally gray brown muck of your brain is lit up. It’s not dusty or powdery as they say in perfumery, but sharper like sand.

Sometime earlier this year Allie texted me a picture of a mangled harpoon she encountered at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. The caption reads: “This twisted harpoon demonstrates not only the strength of a whale under attack but its torturous and circuitous gyrations in its efforts to escape”. Allie’s painting of the harpoon, which appears here in Due, is another turn in the life of this object and like her earlier pictures of tornadoes and circumcisions, it makes flat affect out of acute cosmic violence.

We don’t know what is driving the gang of orcas that are ramming rudders and capsizing boats off the coast of the Iberian Peninsula nor do we really know, amidst any disaster, if we’ve fallen out of G-d’s favor or if we are doing it to ourselves. In Shinto there is no G-d, especially not in daddy form. Whatever this G-d like energy would be then, would be in the harpoon, the scalpel, leftover beans. I’m not sure if it’s right but I like to entertain the idea that it might not just be in them in a diffuse sense, but also be them in a material sense thereby imbuing the sacred with a corporeal existence.

Due is an expectancy. It is also presently, potentially, numerical and in this way it can’t not recall Nietzsche’s metaphysical noon event. Alenka Zupančič walks us through the metaphor in her book The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, “midday is not a moment of unification, when the sun embraces everything, but is, instead, presented as the moment when ‘One turns to Two,’ and as the moment of the “shortest shadow.” One must accept the more than oneness at once as a precondition to everything that is going on in Allie’s work.

In response to the bouillon cube metaphor, Allie told me that astronauts sometimes describe the black of space as having soup-like qualities. It’s being surrounded by thick almost viscous black, black but not dark. When I think of dark soup, which isn’t black but does have its shadow laid on top, I’m right here on earth. I keep thinking that soon we’ll look back at right now like it was nothing. And however it all goes forward, I am certain that this doctrine of non-hysterics will be prudent to what beholds us. The world is always already ending and the line is always already dead but especially now it seems important to remain steely.

—Nancy Lupo, Los Angeles, 1 June 2024

Alexandra Noel (b. 1989) resides in Los Angeles, California. Noel paints on intimately scaled panels, augmenting and enhancing the details of observed reality while exploring a vast range of subject matter that spans geometric abstraction, photorealism and more. She has had solo exhibitions at Derosia, New York (2022); Crèvecœur, Paris (2022); Antenna Space, Shanghai (2021); and participated in group exhibitions such as Burning Down the House: Rethinking Family, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2024), Small Fixations, ICA Milano, Milan (2022), and Made in L.A. 2020: a version, Hammer Museum and The Huntington, Los Angeles (2020).