Susan Hall walks boldly on the magical side of realism. Her recent works offer prime-time viewing in the pictorial “Twilight Zone,” where the familiar is fantastic, where seeing is not necessarily knowing. In this group of recent drawings and paintings Hall is returning to (but not limited by) subjects that have interested her since the early ’70s—women, travel, etc. In both mediums the aim is the same—to make a rich, emotional, psychologically loaded art and to suggest deliciously mysterious experience. Her means is a tension-filled relationship between form and content articulated with a graphically bold and precisely illustrational style that brings out the symbolic edge in all of it. In Queen of Hearts, a conté crayon drawing, a woman holds two cards, one in each gloved hand: on one card is a picture of a baby in a carriage; on the other, a picture of a woman holding a pistol opposite a statue of a rearing horse. The portrait of the woman is sharply cropped in a diagonal fill-the-frame kind of composition that recalls fashion photographers such as Lisette Model. Is this woman real or ideal? What do the picture cards mean to her? What does she mean to us? These are the kinds of questions that all of Hall’s costumed and made-up portraits make us ask. Commenting on popular culture’s preoccupation with glamour on the one hand and harking back to the turn-of-the-century French Symbolists Puvis de Chavannes and Odilon Redon on the other, this is Susan Hall’s most compelling vision to date.
—Ronny Cohen
