Kylie Manning at PES – ARTnews.com

On a plane in 1967, singer JohnI Mitchell read an excerpt from Saul Bellow’s novel Henderson, the rain king where Henderson, also on a plane, looks out the window and marvels at how, having looked at the clouds as a child, he “dreamed of clouds on both sides as no other generation of men did.” Mitchell followed him, dreaming of clouds, studying the scene through the porthole with renewed interest. On that trip, I began writing “both sides now”: “I’ve looked at clouds on both sides now / Top to bottom and still somehow / They are cloud illusions that I remember / I really don’t know clouds at all.”

Kylie Manning’s first solo performance at Pace in Los Angeles borrowed its title from the famous Mitchell song. The painter thinks a lot about weather, temperature, and light – for example, color palette Outback (2022) She is notified of the cold pink twilight of June in Alaska, a time and place she knows well, having lived in Juneau for most of her life—but these references are opaque to the viewer, as in Manning’s enigmatic paintings. .

But the association with clouds, through Manning’s interest in climate, is not the most important link between these paintings and Mitchell’s melody. Both, crucially, attempt to capture the mystery and diversity of life: like cumulus clouds, humans are complex, contradictory, and elusive. However, the figures who fill the works of plastic painters often lose their multidimensionality in translation into drawing. It is displayed on one side only. What sets Manning apart from many is her ability to convey the human form without attaching it to a single mood, motive or meaning – a skill that she associates with predecessors such as Edward Vouillard, Pierre Bonnard and Willem de Kooning. Both Sides Now showcases her series of large paintings that decompose almost into pure abstraction, but never completely lose their foothold in figurative photography.

Manning’s work evokes the speed and lightness of drawing, for the marks at first appear chaotic, semi-arbitrary and incomplete, but the longer I looked, the clearer each mark had been meticulously worked on. The clutter of strokes achieves a delicate balance: for example, light orange washes in the upper area and lower right corner of the you were always On My Mind (2022) balances out the heavy tangle of streaks and stains. Manning uses every tool at her disposal—brush, palette knife, roller, fingers, etc.—and in the hints and squats of her lovely antics, shapes appear like shapes in the clouds. Their bodies are mysterious. Their identities, more than that. Few have a clear gender, gender, race, or age. In fact, even its most detailed numbers somehow manage to wobble from any particularity. At first one might look like a woman because of the way the lips are displayed or the way the neck is tilted, but as you look, you notice other signs – perhaps a defined jaw line or a set of broad shoulders – that seem to indicate opposing directions. Manning undermines the idea of ​​so-called gender tags (and other “identity groups” tags) not only by mixing and matching body parts from different sources, but by crafting characters that reject easy identification.

However, what they lack in privacy, they make up for in possibility and implication. Scenes are designed for the viewer in a hallucinatory manner. in Outback, for example, the anomaly jumps, and a face appears with brown and yellow marks hovering around it. The arm of this figure is stretched down into a knotted fist, and next to it is shown the head of the second figure, this one lying under the first, lying down. But what is the relationship between the first and second numbers? Is their interaction some kind of soft comfort, altruistic help, sexual seduction, or fierce fighting? And why do so many other characters, now emerging from behind the original form, gather? Is there one, perhaps, seeking help? The ghostly figures, and the little fantasy in which they live, refer to a memory or a dream, with everything somehow frighteningly and in motion with Muybridge.

Because of the uncertainty of their identities, and the ambiguity of their relationships, the people who inhabit Manning’s paintings take on a strange sense, and associate the artist with a movement I have described elsewhere as the New Queer Intimists, including Doron Langberg, Salman Toor, and Louis Fratino. But it doesn’t explicitly depict LGBTQ+ narratives in the same way that Langberg (her former studio mate) does, in which two gay men might be resting on the sofa, bodies intertwined, and intertwined with furniture styles. Manning pushes the deterioration of the limbs and sites even further. Her gestural abstraction and bold color choices provide more atmosphere than narrative, so that the “narratives” of her paintings are as elusive as fog (easy to imagine, but impossible to fathom). And her characters are “atypical” not only in the sense that they are not straightforward and straightforward association, but also “anomalous” in the traditional sense: they go beyond simple categorization.

Manning looks at life from both sides now, which seems to result in the understanding that, like Mitchell, “really [doesn’t] Life is ever known”, so the best way to capture it is through a set of vague illusions. It is this allowing – or more precisely this flirtation – of ambiguity, uncertainty and doubt that makes her visions in oil on linen so seductive, impressive, and compelling as reality.