A Chorus of Beauty and Menace
10 April 2021 - 8 May 2021
CARVALHO PARK announces the opening of A Chorus of Beauty and Menace, London artist Yulia Iosilzon’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. On the heels of her London solo and leading up to her Stockholm debut, A Chorus of Beauty and Menace is an abundant new series of paintings on transparent fabric and ceramics, of an Arcadian playscape – a non-existent world hovering above the landscape and set amongst the clouds, of Iosilzon’s singular and emphatic vision. Created under the surrealities of locked-down London, the works originate from a place of imaginary observing. Dispelling the sinister whispers that often lurk behind her idyllic imagery – our menace is in our thoughts and memory – Iosilzon fully orients this work in a sense of symmetry and serenity with heightened fluidity. A Chorus of Beauty and Menace is on view from April 9 to May 8 at Carvalho Park in New York.
Escapism is at the center of this work, informed by a constellation of influences – Greek and Roman mythology, paradisiacal nature, theatre set design, children’s fables and their renderings in books. When preparing for each new body of work, Iosilzon selects emblems as her guide. Here her clouds – like cotton ball fronds – are vessels of serenity. When Day Passes and Moon Appears – the work the artist cites as most pivotal in the series – figures and clouds intertwine, a dance spun by the wind, set in a gauzy pale blue expanse. A musing from Iosilzon’s curiosity of what may take place in the sky, this work is about ecstatic freedom. In the painting Waterlilies Fairytale, buoyant and naive clouds are given human-like features, offering company to the figure lounging on her lily pad in the sky. Glances meet in a moment of interaction. Iosilzon’s figures and anthropomorphized characters are not people but projections of certain mood states, presences of feeling throughout the compositions. In turn, full scenes act as vehicles of emotion.
Iosilzon’s most emotive body of work to date, a distinct shift in palette resounds a continuous desire to be in a fresh and fluid world. These dreamscapes sing in diaphanous blues, while high key yellow, orange and pink invite us into a layered dimension of play. Of the palest tones, the painting Princess Margaret suggests the absence of gravity in its near translucence. Its scene is held only in place by glimpses of orange semi-circles on the periphery. A serpentine black line threads through the compositions, like a vine connecting one painting to the next. While it appears to interrupt Iosilzon’s idyllic scenes, it instead unifies, as a vessel of direction and rhythm, a sense of sound. On occasion, Iosilzon grants an allegorical motif, for how else would one ascend to the sky if not on the back of a bird or climbing the magical beanstalk?
The artist’s selection of transparent fabric heightens the fluidity of her already sweeping, confident line. As faces emerge from swells of color and billowy plumes, their limbs and hair are rendered in calligraphic synchronicity with their fantastical environments. This intertwining signals a desire to return to nature, to be in balance with natural cycles. Here Iosilzon speaks of revitalization, and with the lulling of human intervention during the pandemic, nature made anew.