Pulled, Twisted, Painted: Ilana Savdie
An emerging artist, Ilana Savdie has already crafted a formidable painting practice that turns the human body inside out and spreads dismembered pieces across the canvas. Because of the riotous blanket of colors, however, the work does not feel violent or abject. Indeed, one point of reference is the marimonda, a carnival character who originated in Barranquilla, Colombia, where Savdie spent her childhood. Marimonda has an elephant head and wears an oversized suit and tie – a jab at the uniform of wealthy men and urban professionals. While Savdie’s figures lack the satirical bite of Marimonda, they do have the light-hearted tone of a carnival figure, one that masks a deeper, perhaps disturbing message.
In addition to dazzling colors and deft brushwork, Savdie adds layers of textured wax. By dilating the canvas’ surface and giving the illusion of depth, these wax areas seem biological in appearance, possibly a membrane, skin or a slice of cell tissue under magnification. The skin does not feel flayed or hacked off: more like fabric swatches in a patchwork quilt or a torn piece of paper in a collage. Here too, the dismembered, flayed body feels less violent than it should.
When she takes the human figure and twists it into nearly unrecognizable parts, then endows these figures with artificially bright and discordant colors, Savdie, in her words, “queers” the body. This means that she seeks to make her art strange, unconventional, and difficult to categorize. Indeed, one body has breasts but “her” face is hidden behind a cartoonish mask, while the other, who stands behind her in a menacing, dominating way, lacks obvious markers of gender. By dressing in a costume, shredding the costume into a confetti of fluorescent colors, then stretching limbs out like hot taffy and opening up portals to the body’s interior, the artist gives us the impression of a body without necessarily having a human body present.
Ilana Savdie, Lágrimas y mocos (exploiting a suitable host), 2021, oil, acrylic and beeswax on canvas stretched on panel, 72 x 60 inches. Museum purchase supported by the Luria/Budgor Family Foundation and The Museum Contemporaries Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
Paintings like Lágrimas y mocos (explointing a suitable host) question when it is that a portrait becomes a still-life, or, when a subject shifts from animate to inanimate. Is that a costume with someone inside, or just a costume, an empty shell? The ability to detect consciousness must be hardwired in our brains, for it underpins the recognition of potential dangers. Who has not been startled, if not terrified, when noticing something move that had been still, and who has not stared at a shadow or rock after having detected a false flicker of life? The prolonged examination that Savdie’s figures invite partially comes from this facility.
Savdie’s paintings further engage with our ability to distinguish between the animate and inanimate. Her painting technique and paint application is marvelously varied, sometimes appearing as a modified version of an écorché, common in life drawing classes in which the skin is removed to show the underlying musculature and bones. In two places in Lágrimas y mocos, the artist seems to pull apart the body, an area that resembles a calve and in a jumble of toes. Beyond these two passages, there is a general sense of the body pulled apart to be put on display and the privacy of its interiority is violated. Into how many pieces can something be separated before it becomes mere parts? How can one then look past the bits and pieces to recall the whole?
These are pictures of bodies that fall just short of being portraits of sitters who possess consciousness and vividness. Savdie does not give us a portrait, but neither does she give us still life or an écorché. Whatever this in-between genre might be called, it is all the more compelling for being neither dead nor alive.
Cover image: Ilana Savdie, DETAIL, Lágrimas y mocos (exploiting a suitable host), 2021, oil, acrylic and beeswax on canvas stretched on panel, 72 x 60 inches. Museum purchase supported by the Luria/Budgor Family Foundation and The Museum Contemporaries Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
This piece was originally published in Lum Art Magazine Print Issue 05.
