Ella Kruglyanskaya: Shadows

There are women and there are women. There’s fruit and veg and there’s fruit and veg. There’s art and there’s art. There’s time and there’s time. Can you hear, see, feel the emphasis? Like that old joke of when the lyrics of the song are written out, so the joke doesn’t really work anymore, you say tomato and I say tomato, you say potato and I say potato. And no one really says pot-ah-to or to-mah-to anyway. Not where I am, at least. What I mean to say is that you might think you’re a side-step away, a different version of something, but maybe you are more like a shadow, an echo, an underside, a patina, a halo, the same word repeated so that it doesn’t sound different the second time, but becomes different by means of repetition, a kind of gathering force, a hint at the verso of life, the world just beneath (beyond?) this one.

Ella Kruglyanskaya’s bright, lively, wry, self-aware canvases are filled with subtle questions about emphasis, which we might also think of as questions about reality, representation, narrative, and how far these tendencies in art fail when approached without question. (Or, perhaps as important, without humour.) To start with there are her women. Women rushing about town, wiener dog firmly lodged in a fashionable brown handbag. Women with legs crossed, waiting for the (rotary!) phone to ring. Women sketchily sketched, thick shadows falling across them, accentuating a flatness that reveals a picture plane within a picture plane: the women are not real, they are just (“just”) drawings, maybe tacked up on a studio wall, light flooding the room, the window mullions throwing angular shade, two worlds collide in one and then collide again, in slow-motion (stop motion, end scene, cut cut cut), here on the painted canvas.  

I like to think that the shady woman of Shadows (2022), in her mustard yellow ensemble highlighted with blue, her face cast in deep and otherworldly penumbra, has just left the sunny afternoon couch of her front room, where she forgot about time and had to all of a sudden throw down Frank O’Hara’s 1964 collection Lunch Poems (1964). She was perhaps reading, just up until that moment of departure, “Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]” and thinking how fine is the closing verse about what he thinks after seeing a headline on the street about the glamorous blonde of the Hollywood Golden Age, “LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!” You see a woman, the idea of her, lines meeting on a page in words, ending with an exclamation, can stop you in your tracks like that. “I have been to lots of parties / and acted perfectly disgraceful / but I never actually collapsed / oh Lana Turner we love you get up.”

This exhibition is called Shadows, and it is replete with them — dappled lights, strong angular swathes, delicate curves — but also echoes, shades, homages. We see hints of Manet, Magritte, Anthea Hamilton, Cotán, and in at least one work, Albers Variation (2024), work by the master of colour theory and hard-edge geometries is transformed into its opposite: messy figuration, loose and wild, no right angles, a woman sprung into motion, as if about to dart right off the canvas. But she is not a woman, she’s just (just) a painting, just like Albers’s squares and Magritte’s airless skies and Manet’s dead toreador and Cotán’s still lifes in alcoves against dark backgrounds. But in this world, we make our own sense, in whatever language is available. Calling something by its name, even signing it with one’s own, need not be indexical. In fact, a shadow — like a painting — never is. 

By Emily LaBarge

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