Judith Eisler has been painting film stills for more than two-and-a-half decades. While such a procedure places her in the discourse of appropriation, when an artist engages with a single subject over such a long duration the initial idea, in her case painting appropriated images from films, mostly of women, ceases to be an adequate explanation of the artist’s practice. Something much harder to define occurs. Think of Morandi. It would be absurd to say that his “idea” was to paint bottles. Similarly, it appears that for Eisler, the fact of painting film stills has not been the central concern for some time. Rather, the quality of those photographic images seems to offer her a level of familiarity, a sense of grounding in the subject matter, that enables her to explore picture making in subtle variations and in various painterly registers.
For instance, there is a beautiful small drawing in graphite on paper, titled Sean, 2008, in her current show at Charim Galerie. It shows a profile of a young woman. The blurred texture recalls the drawings of Seurat, while the expression of the figure and the composition invoke Munch’s recurring images of a sick child, especially the lithographs that only show the child’s head. Far from the coolness associated with the appropriationist pictures, the drawing is in heartfelt dialogue with the atmospheric and emotionally charged figuration of early modernism.
Meanwhile, abstraction makes its presence evident in works such as Sean 3, 2022, where the Moiré pattern from photographing a screen appears in the painting like a veil over the realistic portrait of a woman, enhancing the picture’s material quality as a painted canvas. Movie Lights 6, 2016–2023, is an almost-monochrome that removes all traces of illusion and leaves only the delicately modulating surface. In these works, the photographic begins to disappear through intense distillation, and the reality of painting as physical, material presence starts to dominate.
