J aqueline Humphries, Candyman, executed in 2009, is a stellar example from the artist’s mesmerizing series of silver paintings. Through the use of shiny metallic paint which reflects variegated bursts of light back at the viewer, Humphries’ silver paintings are confoundingly complex, inviting the viewer to explore their unfathomable surfaces and necessitating a multi-angle view of the canvas in order to form a complete image of it. With strokes that are both gestural and hard-edged, Candyman is a painting full of contradictions: its surface is alluring yet indecipherable, effortless yet undeniably layered and complex. The present work draws in the viewer with its luxurious shimmery surface and yet approaching it, it dissolves into a symphonic burst of light, color and gesture. Humphries’ works demand to be viewed from various vantage points, each aspect providing a new entree into the world beyond the canvas.
“To me some parts of a painting appear as if you’re looking down at them from an airplane window; others might evoke something that you’re very close to which is out of focus, and maybe this is interlaced with forms that feel very distant, and crisper. The objective is to knit wildly varying perspectives into a unified space. Because of the way light reacts to the metallic paint, the paintings change as your physical relationship to them changes. I like the unstable situation that depends on the light and the viewer both moving around; the painting changes before your eyes. They’re impossible to photograph—there’s no “accurate” image.”
Jacqueline Humphries lives and works in New York. Her work is currently included in the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani and she has had a number of solo exhibitions including most recently at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2021), Dia Art Foundation, The Dan Flavin Art Institute, Bridgehampton, New York (2019) and Greene Naftali, New York (2017, 2015).
