In his book Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (1950), Walter Benjamin recounts loggias from his childhood as places where “space and time come into their own and find each other.” The liminal space that these loggias occupy in Benjamin’s mind seem to provide both the maneuvering area and the impetus for the coagulation of space and time. Through cross-media experimentation with oil, acrylic, printing, and india ink, Eva Nielsen’s depictions of landscapes, ruins, and Parisian suburbia make time materialize, only to stop it in its tracks with her show of “New Paintings.”

For instance, in Lucite, 2015, a single-story house and its columned patio can be seen as if you’re seeing it through a net being pulled in different directions. As the pattern is screen-printed, the painting manifests an illusion-breaking flatness where the net appears to fold onto itself. An ambiguous sense of time prevails. The identically titled diptych, also from 2015, divides a similarly obstructed yet slightly more distant view of the same house into halves, with an empty deck chair in partial shade. By splitting the bucolic scene, surprising undertones of doom and disintegration arise. A semblance of motion invades the picture plane in Dondal, 2016, due to the moiré effect achieved by repeated printing. With no narrative agenda in sight, the artist weaves an interior with large windows into its leafy exterior through strategic reflections. Marcel Duchamp’s Sad Young Man on a Train, 1911–12 , appears to have finally arrived at his destination, but Nielsen keeps going.

— Gökcan Demirkazık