26 Oct 2018

Marisa Takal: People People People People People Building

Jeffrey Stark

Reviewed by William Corwin

Like the Stark gallery itself, a bright niche in the basement of a Chinese shopping mall on East Broadway that both sticks out like a sore thumb and is impossible to find, Marisa Takal's paintings and sculptures are all about trying to fit in. Two oils, People People People and The View (both 2018) are geometric patchworks of words, urban vistas, and patterns implying a disembodied life in the city.

Two filing cabinets in the tiny space are filled with envelopes labeled with stream-of-consciousness words and topics, and relate to the paintings in their neat, offbeat mathematical structure and their neurotic subject matter. Drawing a connection between the painterly and the conceptual reminds one of Lewis Carroll's riddle, "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" The drawers are pulled to different degrees, exposing information, but leaving much to the imagination. Rather than a memory palace, Takal has constructed a pocket-sized oasis of a proverbial remembrance of things past.