Eileen Quinlan

It’s hard not to be seduced by the array of Eileen Quinlan’s shimmering vermillion and amber panels, which recall Turner’s feverish sunsets or the violent splendor Delacroix gives to Sardanapalus’s bed linens. In Quinlan’s current exhibition in Paris, the sole work on view is Double Charlie, 2015: two photographs of a nearly abstract metallic leather surface shot under similar studio setups. Alternating across two rows of six panels, the entire editions of both pictures are presented, a recurring device of the artist. This accumulation of near equivalences pushes the specificity of the photographic exposure into the status of a decorative placeholder, filling one gallery wall with a tile-like proliferation.

Less than three months after the shootings, it would be nearly impossible in this city for the title not to conjure Charlie Hebdo. (Then again, Quinlan has previously given her works the names of perfumes, and Charlie is also a Revlon fragrance line.) Yet meaning remains elusive, and the inadequacy of the image alone as a vehicle of signification renders the pieces available to fantastic projection. Romantic themes suggest themselves in Double Charlie: desire and persuasion, trauma and mourning, transgression and violence. It’s difficult to pin any of this down. Quinlan’s equivocal images marshal the tools of contemporary media to solicit our interest, but to what end remains tantalizingly obscure. Perhaps that’s the temptation of a beautiful backdrop: instruments of atmosphere, carrying the scent of a loaded context.