January 2008, No.1, Page 137
PORTLAND, ORE.
Katherine Ace
At Froelick
“Shattered” might have been an apt title for Katherine Ace’s exhibition of mostly still-life paintings (all 2006), many depicting broken dinnerware in beautiful profusion. Strewn throughout these works are pages cut from art-history texts or the daily news, linking these pictures to tradition and to the contemporary world. In Dining with the Ancients, where a long table supports a jumbled array of small sculptural replicas, Ace imagines a communion with forebears through a kind of cannibalistic feast of past works, from the Discobolos and Nike of Samothrace to Michelangelo’s Moses. The remains of this strange Symposium, staged in a mysterious interior with Pompeiian red walls, include dishes, papers, and draperies purple and white; a big knife stabs the table, while art books with pages open lie strewn across the floor. The upright knife eschews its more common role in still life—as an occasion for skillful foreshortening—to become an emblem of latent violence.
Most intriguing is the tension between dense, heavily worked surfaces, built up with layers of paint and collage, and the delicate, tromp-l’oeil transparency of the glassware Ace renders alongside broken china and crumpled papers. At the center of Silent Witness, one sees the image of cutout reproduction—staring back through the scintillating bowl of a wine glass. In this and other examples, one surveys the wreckage from above. Among the detritus, tiny translucent currants glisten. A pair of scissors included in the paintings confirms that we are looking at clippings from art books—not just a La Gioconda, but also her Renaissance kin as rendered by Titian and Botticelli. The scissors recur in other works as well, attributes of the artist as much as any brush or palette knife and, like the bristling blade in Dining with the Ancients, the talisman of some underlying rage.
Looking Down Seeing Up, extends Ace’s subtle play around the theme of vision—all those “glasses”and returned gazes—while collapsing multiple registers of space onto the painting’s single plane. Among a dozen luscious pears and plums, three watery photographs appear, reflecting trees and sky. In one, a fish swims just below the bubbly surface. Submarine and celestial worlds are here radically condensed, as levels of mediation proliferate: landscape mirrored in the water’s surface, fish seen through water, water photographed, photographs painted. While traditional still life rejects lofty subjects, banishes the figure and eschews narrative, Ace, with her pictures within pictures, has it all, revealing a story of destructive urges gloriously sublimated in paint.
—Sue Taylor
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