Curated by E. Tornai Thyssen, at HallSpace, Boston 02125, September 3-October 8, 2011
Essay by E. Tornai Thyssen, 2011

Willie Marlowe’s new work, paintings and collages on a small scale insist on a close, personal scrutiny.  The Albany, NY-based artist is known for palpable and intense color embedded in glistening opaque paint that seems to shape itself into something magically alive.  The conjured objects squirm with delight as they jump, roll, hang, and burrow into the ether of stage-like settings and interrogate illusion and reality.  Improbable, cartoonish, sometimes farcical and sometimes deeply brooding, Marlowe’s imagery is born out of paint, the artist’s touch and a delightful sensuality ready to support personalized interpretations by each beholder.

Mysterious Canal, 2010 collage, acrylic on paper (6x6.5")

Venetian glassmaking and Venice itself have inspired Marlowe in recent years as she to took up residency in the city of canals for several weeks at a time.  Malleable glass behaves in ways similar to her handling of paint.  Even the shapes she floats in Glass Furnace, Glass Rod and Venetian Balancing Act suggest the molten globules hanging at the tips of glassblowing rods. The shapes evoke a solid reality as they levitate above, below and behind one another, conjuring a comical, acrobatic performance.  

Corte Ca' Michiel, 2010 acrylic on paper (8x6.5")	Venetian Balancing Act, 2009 acrylic on paper (6.5x7")

Unusual for all the space it claims, Diamond Triangle II declares a new love for soft, dusty colors.   The design within the shaped canvas is born of nestled rhomboids. Although constricting, the austere geometry is unable to pin the design onto a flat plane and the triangular elements oscillate like parts of a folded origami shield.  The textured surfaces soak up light, and contrast with the smoothly painted stripes that enhance the effect.  The cool geometry, the play with spatial perception, and the creamy humid colors also define a suite of small paintings like Rainwater Well and Alchemy with Glass.  In these the shapes emerge amoeba-like from thin, colored veils that barely exist in space. 

	Wall with Inkjet Prints
Diamond Triangle II, 2009 acrylic on canvas (62x60")

Marlowe’s images often divide into vertical segments serving as screens. Objects hover in mid-air in colors so intense their afterimage vibrates in white and black.  Marlowe capitalizes on the polarity between the presence and absence of intense colors.  She writes:

                 My paintings have always been about color, intense close valued color, neon color, deep color-texture—all color all the time I sometimes take a break and work in pure black and white.  Not a painterly black with a special combination of color or a nuanced white, but Ivory Black and Titanium White straight from the tube.  After a “time-out” to work exclusively in black and white, when I return to color, it feels new again and I find more unexpected possibilities.[Correspondence with author, July 31, 2011]  

Dividing, sorting, and organizing is key to the black and white squares painted during the summer in a “time-out” period voided of color.  Its twelve units can be arranged to aggregate into a totemic shape, or spread to invoke the pattern of a visual poem. Each square harbors triangles and trapezoids nestled next to one another, some with calligraphic marks and playful scribbling to reinforce the flow across the grid.   

Willie Marlowe with Keys, 2011 acrylic, paper, wood (12x12" each)

Some of Marlowe’s imagery ties closer to material facts.  Several prints are digitally reworked diagrams of labyrinths surviving from centuries ago when they could have imaged the earthly journey toward the discovery of truth. Marlowe purchased the right to reproduce the diagrams in her own work in 2004.[Labyrinth diagrams  originally published in Jeff Saward, Labyrinths and Mazes: A Complete Guide to Magical Paths of the World, New York: Lark books, 2003] Then she painted them with the electronic stylus dipped into the palette of colored pixels offered by Photoshop.  The diagrams, themselves geometric reductions of the labyrinth patterns underfoot, become alive with the digital colors.  The Eilenriede Turf Labyrinth still survives near the site of ancient Germanic cults.  Marlowe awakens its enigmatic purpose and draws in into our present world of virtual realities.  On the other hand the watercolor drawings of ancient rocks from County Kerry in Ireland connect the unique mark of hand skills to a single original.  Painted in grey-green washes on handmade paper, the drawing reveals a yearning for the secrets of prehistory.  Raised, transported, aligned and incised, the boulders were forced to structure ancient concepts of the universe.  

Rock Art II, County Kerry, 2005 watercolor on handmade paper (6x8")

Marlowe connects the history of humanity to her imagination and creative process. The organic membrane of Glass Wheel resembles the surface in Rock Art II, and the colored objects floated within evoke images of ancient DNA .  As the wheel tumbles the ancient junk rattles and laughs within.  Some fragments have jettisoned earlier to lead distinct lives and become Marlowe’s other paintings of singular delights.

All artwork discussed in this essay is on view at  HallSpace September 3-October 8, 2011 950 Dorchester Avenue, Boston, MA 02125 OPEN: Friday & Saturday 12-5pm (Monday - Thursday by appointment)  email: hallspace1@aol.com