03 Nov 2016

Elisabeth Condon: Bird and Flower

Lesley Heller Gallery

Reviewed by Franklin Einspruch

Elisabeth Condon has long been a visual gourmand and her appetites only ever increase. Her latest work at Lesley Heller shows her incorporating wallpaper patterns into a stock of tropes that already included Chinese scroll paintings, botanical diagrams, gestural abstraction, discotheque lighting, and divers borrowings from the whole world's history of landscapes.

The results are wondrous. American Pastoral (2016, acrylic, latex, glitter on linen) is a flower study, stylistically exploded into its component parts of color, texture, and shape. Leaves of teal and indigo extend away from it like shrapnel. The background is stains of vermilion and fluorescent orange, dripping vertiginously upwards.

Valéry noted that Morisot's "every phase, every moment was not so much shared with art as imbued with it, as though indistinguishable from the urge to see and the instinct to catch the bloom on what is seen." Likewise Condon in her temperament, at once studious and buoyant.