Opening | Eröffnung:
Thursday | Donnerstag, 16.03.2023, 7 - 9 pm | 19:00 - 21:00

In Praise of Women
On the paintings of Judith Eisler

By Max Henry

Every phase of life has its design. Every phase of life runs its course. The nature of a thing can only be expressed as it is concentrated. The unknown impulses of a person have its effect upon their world, and it is in the eyes that we sense them. The interior life then, marks the personality, and it reverberates in the paintings of Judith Eisler.

Her uncanny depictions of women owe a fidelity to the feminine mystique in all its psychological power. Resplendent, and expansive, the qualities of the rhythmic waveforms, and the richness of their subtle color transitions, are pictures as instruments of Eisler’s mind. The light waves of her palette move through various spectrums; some get absorbed into the whole, others are reflected, and we have spatial ruptures within the continuity. These very subtle prisms become visible as red, orange, yellow, blue, green, indigo, and violet.

Therein lies an allusion to the underlying emotional constitution of said protagonists extracted from their appropriated filmic personae, into the universal composite of woman. And in their physiognomies are the primal characteristics of such female archetypes. They are very much depictions of contemporary women, fixed images of the now, with the eternal longings of charged emotions.

Through the moil, and through the din, the ups and downs have been rescripted here. What fate awaits the blush faced women with their capricious moods, the stir of their heartbeat, the solemn hush of their soft breath, the whispers of the cognitive mind, the sound of their voice, the hopes, wishes, silent yearnings, and dreams scripted upon the scroll of time. Who cannot recognize the interior states of such sweet sorrow, and nod with empathy, and cerebral detachment at the depths of their stylistic whimsy depicting the forlornness of busted romances, petty trifles, many twists of fate, unknown destinies, and the whole arc of the lived drama. For are we not creatures of media impressions as they have been doled out to us? Is it not up to the artist to counteract the editorial weight of the impressionable onslaught; to clear the cobwebs of their manifold repetitions?

Voyeuristically speaking, we ought to acknowledge the fault lines of the coalescing humaneness in Eisler’s pictures. Let us concede to each performative chameleon their own
mind in a vast tangle of possibilities and expressive charge in the wilderness of selfhood, motives, and attitude. Consider the times we live in and remember that these strong and independent women are the anti-heroines of yesterday, and of tomorrow, with all their strengths and flaws, and all their worldly vulnerabilities.

As paeans to the lost romance of cinema, with the intelligence of literary construct, the vivid hues and steely gaze of their faces reveal the forces at play in Eisler’s fictitious world of the real, through photographic sense memory. Thus, what lies beneath the surface of Judith Eisler’s refined, sensual palette, is the broken spell of dramatis personae transposed into the life force of the personal. Be that as it may, the artist inserts her own psyche to break the fictional bonds of weariness, despondency, ill health, age, and heartbreak. Yet the transformative beauty of her assignations is that the air of mystery remains; it makes itself felt. We gravitate back to our stirred impressions, the irresistible womanly countenances wrought by her fine honed brushwork, and the winsome telltales of their beautiful, laughing eyes.