Intersections: Elsa-Louise Manceaux & Hilda Palafox

In 1946, Ad Reinhardt drew a famous cartoon in which a viewer points at an abstract painting and asks mockingly, “Ha ha! What does this represent?” The painting, which has reconfigured itself to have a face, immediately responds while pointing back at him: “What do you represent?” The cartoon encapsulates one of the major shifts introduced by abstraction: painting ceases to be an object waiting to be explained and becomes an interlocutor. The accompanying text develops the same intuition:

“An abstract painting will react to you if you react to it. You get from it what you bring to it. It will meet you halfway, but no further. It is alive if you are. It represents something, and so do you. YOU, SIR, ARE A SPACE, TOO.”

Elsa-Louise Manceaux’s radio-paintings no longer simply respond: they speak. In them, the surface brightens and darkens; images become words, words become voice, and voice invites us into a conversation: how do you paint oxygen? How do you represent an atmosphere? What is the right distance from which to understand the world? What makes a question a good question?

At what point do we stop seeing pigment, light, or words and enter into conversation with a surface?

This question runs throughout Surfaces of Exchange, an exhibition in which Manceaux explores painting simultaneously as receptacle and transmitter: a surface capable of receiving signs, images, words, and affects, but also of putting them back into circulation. “Surfaces of desire or surfaces of knowledge?” the artist asks at one point in the radio-painting. The question might be addressed to every work in the exhibition and, indeed, to any painting. What do we deposit onto a surface, and what do we expect to receive from it? Whose desire and knowledge does it contain: the artist’s or the viewer’s?

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HILDA PALAFOX

PETRICOR

How dearly we missed petrichor this summer—that first scent of rain as it touches the earth. Across Europe, perhaps as never before, the heat enveloped those of us who, with the first cold days of October barely upon us, already find ourselves longing for the sun’s piercing rays. And so we spend the next six months yearning for them beneath the low clouds of Paris, as the days grow shorter and shorter until the shortest one arrives, when the sun sets halfway through the afternoon.

But this year, the sun burned. And in the midst of summer, it offered us an extraordinary sight: an eclipse, during which it was partially concealed by the moon. These were strange days, when our lives seemed to revolve around the sun’s relentless heat, its perfect alignment with our satellite, the realization of its indescribable power over our existence, and our own folly in the face of the countless ecological warnings its effects have been sounding for years.

The paintings by Hilda Palafox in this exhibition, however, belong not to August in Paris but to August in Mexico: an August our bodies know by heart, whose famous relámpagos have even been enshrined in our modern literature. More than a people of the sun, we are a people who have worshipped water since ancient times. Tláloc and Chalchiuhtlicue, Nahua deities to whom colonial chroniclers respectively assigned masculine and feminine genders—a distinction possibly sharpened by the polarizing categories of European interpretation—embody a relationship that cannot be reduced to a single force or a single meaning. Within them coexist fertility and destruction, abundance and scarcity, sky and earth.

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