Medrie MacPhee

For almost five decades, Medrie MacPhee’s paintings have navigated the space between abstraction and representation. While architecture and demolition were primary references in her early collages and drawings, the artist has turned to the use of ordinary materials – second-hand and discount clothing with its concomitant buttons, zippers, and seams – pasted to the surface of stretched canvas. The result is at once anatomical and topographical: a plane of shapes, seams, and decorative details, unified by a wash of white gesso like a blanket of snow over the landscape seen from a plane window.

While MacPhee’s materials are modest, her ability to wield them is anything but. Her sharp instinct for scale and her obsession with preserving a sense of disequilibrium and off-balance tension in the final image reveal the surprising textural possibilities of flatness. She finds the sourcing, deconstruction, and reassembly of discarded clothing deeply satisfying – a process which results in collages steeped in memory, material history, geometric potential, and a quiet, overlooked poetry.

MacPhee is also Nicole Eisenman’s good friend and unofficial “paint doctor”. The two met in 2002 while teaching at Bard College, and during the long drives they shared from the city to the campus, they compared notes on the exhibitions they had seen that week. The artists began to trade studio visits, advice, and coffee, and the rest is history.

In this conversation for Elephant, MacPhee and Eisenman cover the false binary of abstraction and figuration, regret and purpose in life’s last chapters, what a world without signs might look like – and the violent acts of “painticide” they commit when a work doesn’t come out quite right.

marcdanielmayer

Medrie MacPhee’s show “The Repair” reconciles figuration and abstraction with great subtlety. Asemic compositions are formed of deconstructed clothes collaged to the picture plane and dissimulated under paint. Only spectral outlines and smothered textures survive of fabric cut to cover bodies. New structures are imposed and erratic lines drawn to put us off the scent of the figure. Abstraction’s encryption of appearances, its retreat from mimesis, anecdote, sentiment, temporality, and movement in space, is held tightly to these incidented surfaces. The work is taut, conceptually and physically, but also emotionally as we slowly distinguish ghosts. Clothes that once concealed bodies are themselves concealed, occulting the figure without obliterating its memory. Only a faint recollection remains—at a sentimental remove because these are not our clothes—of the sensual shapes and movements of an anonymous subject standing for us like a semiotic proxy. MacPhee recycles a random wardrobe for a new purpose, a redundant occultation not only of the figure, but of the landscape where it moves; a scene painted to distance us further from the figure and the animate maker of these pictures. Time and culture, the dating language of bodily adornment, are neutralised in the articulation of a space stripped of overt reference. These pictures are their own metaphor. MacPhee makes abstractions that remind us what was originally meant by the word, retracing its etymology algebraically, and exposing what was lost in the forward march of the idiom: “Abstraction of what?” is a question we no longer ask. Having reached the monochrome, or should I say submitted to it as one submits to God, or to psychoanalysis, the “what” is discarded like old clothes. Something is roiling here under the paint, flattened, stilled, silenced, but roiling.

The five abstract paintings in Medrie MacPhee’s “The Repair,” at Tibor de Nagy, have just enough indications of figure/ground and observed reality to evoke landscape, interior space, aerial view, blueprint. What also connects these paintings to the physical world, as we perceive it, are minor shifts of line, contour, or color that activate the surface and keep the paintings from being flat. While the paintings are large, all but one measuring 64 x 84 inches, somehow the small gallery doesn’t feel crowded. The colored shapes within each painting are similarly large, with a looming assertiveness, but also a matter-of-factness that can be disarming. Color is applied in uniform expanses and the same color can serve as both figure and ground and as simply a painted surface. And then there’s the way that clothing, which underlies it all, mimics the human form.

About five years ago, Medrie MacPhee began to rethink her paintings. She jettisoned her swirling, unstable compositions, whose tangled forms, derived from architecture, often hung, Surrealist style, in empty space. She found, as many painters do as they mature, that she could do more with less. She started collaging parts of cutup garments to her canvases, fitting them together like puzzles, letting their welted seams define taut shapes that now extend edge to edge. She replaced a familiar illusionism with an adamant, witty physicality. In so doing, she dramatically improved her work and took ownership of it.

Four new canvases form “Words Fail Me,” MacPhee’s impressive second solo show with Tibor de Nagy. They are powerfully flat, more literal than abstract. Their compartments of color are alternately solid, slightly brushy or wiped down to a pale transparency. The familiar details function formally while providing little shocks of recognition: not only seams, but also belt loops, waistbands and the occasional zipper or pocket. In “Favela,” belt-looped waistbands painted white divide blocks of red and brown; they are placed vertically, like ladders, which evoke the title and MacPhee’s affection for architecture. In the majestic “Take Me to the River,” the entire surface is a deep oceanic blue and the dividing seams are picked out in white. It suggests a sparsely lighted terrain seen at night, from above. But plenty of seams are left lurking in the blue, creating a ghostly infrastructure whose depths have a horizontal pull — perhaps out to sea.

ROBERTA SMITH