Jade Pergl’s ‘Delicate Reminders’

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Photo Via Underscore - Instagram

‘Delicate Reminders’ by Jade Pergl

‘Delicate Reminders’ by Jade Pergl

I was caught by pleasant surprise last week when I stumbled into the hanging of an exhibition at Underscore gallery. The exhibition “Delicate Reminders,” runs through March 30, and features 11 brilliant paintings by local artist Jade Pergl. Encountering the artist and gallery director Michael Lagerman installing the suite of works piqued my curiosity enough to return on Saturday to see it fully hung. The show turned out, like the intimate gallery space itself, to be understated, sharp, clean, but with enough nested eccentricity to leave my imagination reeling, a little unresolved and perfectly content.  

Like Underscore’s clean-white-cube-inside-an-old-basement situation, Pergl’s paintings of interlocking tendrils and leaves on stretched transparent fabric suggest a dose of familiar minimalism inside something more unorthodox. Pergl’s paintings reveal their traditionally rooted architecture from the outset. The sheer fabric on their faces only partially obscures their stretcher bars. Obviously, Pergl could have chosen a cradling system that would have concealed the paintings’ skeletons, but by revealing the supports she expands and charges the compositional relationships at her command. This reveal calls attention to the conventions of painting and the terms of its magic—the painting equivalent of breaking the fourth wall.  

This interference between surface and support activates the imagery in the work. Her inked flora flourishes within the artificial confines of those stretcher bar gardens. Pergl’s vining imagery seems to recognize the architecture under and around it, the marks hewing and hovering around to the supports like stalks growing toward the sun. The work Delicate Reminders is somewhat more all-over than others in the show, with the linework of petals and seedpods interweaving more evenly across the painting’s sheer surface. And what a surface it is: a soft and delicate melding of pigment and woven fiber, all in the service of a dazzling mazelike composition of surging organic matter. The transparency of the surface allows it, like the others in the show, to function independently from near and far. From afar they read almost as ghostly transparent monochromes leaning toward critique. On close inspection, however, the dense networks of organically inspired linework conflicts with that distant read, creating a third possibility. The “something else” as it was for Jasper Johns.  

Harsh, Jagged Decisions 

Pergl’s choice of a looser fabric in some cases causes her ink and acrylic washes to make harsh and jagged decisions along the grid, in the same way a digital image eventually gives way to the limitations of screen resolution. This causes angular runs and bleeds that conflict brilliantly with the feel of the organic imagery. These events generate a glitchy arbitrariness that somehow ties the subject matter all the way back to the geometry of its supports.   

Though the 11 paintings are variations on a similar theme, several stand out as welcome oddballs. The 16-inch square Garden Painting suspends a scene of dancing stems and leaves on top of a two-inch-wide stretcher. A murky shadow of washed-out pen ink at on the lower right bathes that thatch of natural imagery in a synthetic shadow that keeps the content as in-between as its substrates are—natural and artificial; organic and synthetic; line and value, mind and body, all fighting for control but ending in a satisfying stalemate.  

All these competing reads keep Pergl’s work nimble and punchy. Superficially, her paintings are exceedingly elegant and formal, so they’re served well by unpacking so much unexpected conflict. The works at Underscore are invigorated by all this contradiction and counterintuition. We’re looking at art to be surprised after all, otherwise we’d be almost anywhere else in the cultural universe. But to surprise takes seducing just a little with familiarity and comfort, before subverting those expectations accordingly. Mission accomplished.