...therefore the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken.

— Genesis 3:23

...there are

still songs to sing beyond

mankind.

— Paul Celan, “Threadsuns”

A few months ago, when I felt lost to that dream-like haze induced by working life and in desperate need of some potent aesthetic refreshment, I came across “New Work” (2019) by Gladys Nilsson, like a vision one approaches. These paintings by the Chicago Imagist, exhibited at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, are populated by a species of lovable creatures that are much like restless children or mischievous cherubs grown into adulthood. Not exactly human individuals, the figures in these paintings are like the nymphs and satyrs of classical painting but stripped of the content of myth and left to inhabit its frame. Backgrounds of dense forest, fields and floating forms of mottled color, rudiments of landscape jutted up together to set the boundaries of perspective — having lost their relation to myth, are freed in Nilsson’s paintings from any moral or symbolic purpose. Rather, these landscape motifs seem to press against the very surface of the paintings, striving to fulfill by this proximity some new sense of the medium’s pictorial ground in and through which the groups of playful figures appear.

Gladys Nilsson, Classic in the Woods, 2017. Acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 36.125 x 48 inches. Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago. Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

In paintings like Slid (2018) and Classic in the Woods (2017), Nilsson’s figures and landscapes occupy a realm beyond space. In place of shadow and naturalistic gradations of light are wild variations in color, manic tones that reverberate on impact and form the distinct shapes of dancing matter that seem either to be superimposed onto the picture or to underlay it as a sort of pre-figurative ether. Around and through this painterly realm emerge the contorted limbs of figures stepping into view. Their blank stares, the sly smiles and slight frowns with which they look to one another speak as if they held a secret truth that can’t be told. The entire enigmatic fabric of this reality is drawn into the game the figures play of concealing and revealing their place in the picture. In Slid the picture plane appears to split and refract so that a female figure enters the image like an angel suspended between planes of existence. One of the men below grasps at her wrist while the other gently holds onto the edge of that other space that has folded into theirs, the portal through which the woman appears and disappears miraculously. Far down below swim a few others, mostly indifferent to what occurs around them. 

The figures in these paintings belong to the same world as the assistants, fools, and students that appear in Kafka’s work. The critic Walter Benjamin described them as “celestial creatures, beings in an unfinished state … messengers from one to the other …. [who] have not yet been completely released from the womb of nature.” [1] They speak in gestures for something that has yet to arrive. Benjamin goes on to write that:

Kafka’s entire work constitutes a code of gestures which surely had no definite symbolic meaning for the author from the outset; rather, the author tried to derive such a meaning from them in ever changing contexts and experimental groupings … Each gesture is an event — one might even say, a drama — in itself. The stage on which this drama takes place is the World Theater which opens up toward heaven. On the other hand, this heaven is only background; to explore it according to its own laws would be like framing the painted backdrop of the stage and hanging it in a picture gallery. Like El Greco, Kafka tears open the sky behind every gesture; but as with El Greco — the gesture remains the decisive thing, the center of the event. [2]

In Gladys Nilsson’s paintings the gesture complements the picture; the figures act like conjurers of their very presence, for example, in the retrospective gaze of the bending woman of Classic in the Woods who turns to face her would-be voyeurs and coquettishly plays along. The game is for the sake of the viewer who stands outside the painting looking in. 

In a recent interview, Nilsson recalled the inspiration for an earlier painting in the famous Adam and Eve diptychs of German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder. Cranach had been an ardent supporter of the Protestant Reformation and intimate friends with Martin Luther. Perhaps this helps explain the impenetrable darkness that shrouds the Garden of Eden from which Adam and Eve will soon be expelled. The source of light in this painting can only come from somewhere on this side of the Garden; it falls illuminating the front of the figures from a place beyond Genesis, in History from where the artist and viewer gaze back. Dusk has fallen on the naive childhood of man, but a new dawn awakens the species to consciousness and illuminates new realms of experience; creation ceases to be the condition of mankind but rather becomes its most sacred occupation.

Cranach’s vision signals the twilight of a religious cosmos giving way to the Enlightenment and the re-discovery of the world of nature — for the Fall which tore us from the simple perfect unity of Genesis also supplied the means of knowledge by which this happiness can be reclaimed in freedom. As Schiller recognized at the height of the bourgeois epoch (which is the origin of ours):

[Mankind] conceives, as idea, a state of nature, a state not indeed given him by any experience, but a necessary result of what reason destined him to be; attributes to himself in this idealized natural state a purpose of which in his actual natural state he was entirely ignorant, and a power of free choice of which he was at that time wholly incapable; and now proceeds exactly as if he were starting from scratch, and were, from sheer insight and free resolve, exchanging a state of complete independence for a state of social contracts. However skillfully, and however firmly, blind caprice may have laid the foundations of her work, however arrogantly she may maintain it, and with whatever appearance of venerability she may surround it — man is fully entitled in the course of these operations to treat it all as though it had never happened. [3]

Thus the Garden fades in darkness in the memory of mankind and yet lies behind every subsequent action as the enigmatic source of its power. Describing what attracted her to Cranach’s Adam and Eve, Nilsson says that it was “how it just had these two people in this dense landscape, and how then life began after that.” [4]

Painting Nature (2018), the centerpiece of Nilsson’s exhibition, represents another version of the Adam and Eve diptych, after Cranach’s own reference in Dürer. Here, the painter has incorporated herself into the figure of Adam. The fruit and branch of the tree of knowledge held naively by Dürer’s Adam has been transformed into the painter’s brush. Original sin is thereby alloyed to the realm of the aesthetic, forming—as the origin of consciousness and imagination—the pictorial ground of the painting. The ambiguity of the title speaks to this: does Painting Nature refer to the activity of painting nature or does it not also suggest that painting has its own nature which must shine forth? Gladys Nilsson stands at the other end of a process of Enlightenment that began with the Renaissance and came into crisis with the Industrial Revolution. The fall of the ancient world that revealed a new dimension of nature to the reflective consciousness of Cranach and Dürer has itself become opaque. The figures in Nilsson’s paintings are no longer the imagined ancestors of bourgeois individuals but emerge as phantasmic forms bound up within the structure of the picture itself. Hence also the reference to The Painter’s Studio of Gustave Courbet where the real space of the painter fuses with the painterly realm of his landscape and his absorption calls forth the figures that inhabit this world; finally, the painter’s vision is so strong that even the stone walls of the studio dissolve within the picture. The absolute void behind Cranach and Dürer's figures of Adam and Eve has disappeared in a whirlwind of refracted light that illuminates the lost Garden with elements drawn from the medium of painting itself. Line, shape, and color appear as the historical sediment of what painting has known itself to be; at the same time, this realm of pure painting constitutes a new nature from which in turn the figures are torn. On the other side is the viewer who laughs barbarically and must make do with the image. //

 [1] Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed. (New York: Schocken, 1969), 117.

 [2] Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” 121.

[3]  Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), in Essays, Walter Hinderer and Daniel Dahlstrom, eds. (New York: Continuum, 2005), 90-91.

[4] Ella Huzenis, “Gladys Nilsson Paints Like She People Watches,” Interview (February 21, 2020), available online at Interview Magazine.