Observational Candor in Ariana Vaeth's Exhibit at Lynden Sculpture Garden

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Ariana Vaeth, Rose Garden, 2020 - Oil on canvas - 36x60

Constructed of private spaces, filled with friends captured in the midst of private activities and thoughts, Ariana Vaeth’s paintings are enthusiastic dedications to interiority. Her works have a knack for taking what might be voyeuristic documents and projecting them outward in paint as open invitations; inside jokes that we want to join, and can, simply by looking closely. It is not easy to make such private experiences universally accessible, but she does so effortlessly through tubeloads of color and observational candor, which is on full display by appointment in a suite of new works at the Lynden Sculpture Garden’s gallery through September 27.

The seven paintings of people gathering casually in various interiors seem of another time, when sitters languished together on couches and beds without a care. The psychological enthusiasms of her paintings feel slightly incongruous with our current prophylactic state of existence, but so do most enthusiasms. The delightful painting Dye Party depicts three young females inside a cramped bathroom seemingly caught frozen in thought, just following what must have been a kinetic and close-contact event. Despite what is an intimate and private moment, the figure on the right gazes outward, allowing us to penetrate the scene.

Another large virtuously executed painting called Rose Garden captures what looks like a quick-shutter snapshot of a casual bedroom interaction between two female subjects, just chilling idly in the middle of the day. By dispensing with distracting compositional theatrics, the casual composition draws us helplessly into its languorously mundane reality. They feel like Victorian drawing room compositions for the River West crowd; just presence, paint, observational rigor, and the idle time to make it all happen. The figure on the bed in the work is Vaeth herself, and in Dye Party she was in the bathtub, calling into question the sources of these most immediate of moments.

Tightrope Act

Vaeth’s work flirts with both observational and photo-based painting, a tightrope act that is complicated further by the inclusion of her own image in additional works. In at least five of the seven paintings in the show, in fact. One that doesn’t feature her is Henkhause Girls, a wonderful portrait of two tween-ish girls spilling out lazily on an L-shaped couch. Vaeth’s presence, along with other subtle tells, such as errant gazes, fragmented spaces, and of course their basic size and complexity, tells us that her compositions aren’t totally one-take, ecstatic, wet-on-wet painting events. However, they are constructed, her works possesses the spirit of direct painting and avoids the pitfalls of synthetic composition and deadening hints of photographic reference. Their distorted foregrounds and fish-eyed vision tip us off, too. These charming imperfections will remind those who paint of the unique mental and visual dilemma of trying to capture the world at our feet with an active hand, a swiveling head, and a round eyeball, as opposed to a camera’s flattening lens and printed equivalent. Yes, the nerds among us will be familiar with the visual experience a foreground subject collapsing around them as they try to capture it in Brunelleschi’s crisp and inhumane perspective. It doesn’t hold; there’s a ghost in the math. And if you aren’t nerdy enough to know from experience, take a look at works by anyone from Jenny Saville, to Lucian Freud, to Mary Cassatt, to Édouard Vuillard to confirm.

Vaeth’s blend of naturalism, intimacy and social mixing, makes for a strange cocktail at Lynden. While she depicts psychological interiors, nested within social interiors, inside special interiors, the physical works live inside a gallery, inside a 40-acre sanctuary for large-scale sculpture, and a refuge from reality at a time when the idea of a refuge only reminds one of constriction. As I strolled the grounds after seeing her show, in a mask, with my children, among others with masks and children, all awkwardly distancing and unsure of how to speak to each other, I felt like I was going from imagined space, to natural space, to conceptual space, and back to natural again, wondering where one ended and the other began. It was a little surreal. Life is slowly merging into art these days, and it would be a whole lot better if it would just focus up and leave the ambiguity to the artists themselves.

To read more visual art reviews by Shane McAdams, click here.