A Multiplicity of Identities |
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In Placed, Quarles’s own perspectives on identity can be read in the multiplicity of tones used to render her subjects. “As a Queer, cis-woman who is Black but is often mistaken as white, I engage with the world from a position that is multiply situated,” the artist has elucidated.[i] The frontal figure is depicted with a pale peach left leg and a navy right one, while her body and the rear lover’s left arm and right fingers are filled with iridescent silver contoured by lavender, cerulean, and orange. Moreover, the ambiguity of both the race and gender of the upper figure challenges the tradition of heteronormativity that has typically presented in art historical portrayals of love.
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"In my development as an artist it was always at the forefront of my mind to engage with ambiguity" — Christina Quarles
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It’s All in the Details |
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Though the identities of the bodies in Placed are for the most part ambiguous and unfixed, select aspects are characterized by their contrasting clarity. The most salient features are the subjects’ hands and feet, details of much significance to the artist and depicted in the meticulous exactitude used in life drawing. “For a long time I worked through this idea of the outermost edge of your self being represented through the hands and the feet,” Quarles illuminated. “I think of them as the outermost extremities, where you interact with the world.”[ii]
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Private Desires and Public Identities
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Confronting preconceived notions of identity and sexuality, Quarles’s captivating, intertwining bodies lovingly interact and embrace—and in the case of Placed, kiss—across a brilliant wave of color. By engaging with the art historical canon, the painter has captured in Placed a portrait of the past and the future, of both the imposing rigidity of social constructions of identity and the collapse of these implied restrictions when we join together. As critic David Pagel articulately expressed, her paintings are “a sustained meditation on the complex ways our private desires and public identities interact with each other to shape our understanding of who we are as individuals, as communities, as a people and as a species.”[iii] |
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Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1907-1908. Oesterreichische Galerie im Belvedere, Vienna, Photo Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY |
Bacon and Quarles: A Dialogue |
Quarles’s figures, twisting and turning across a canvas articulated by moments of impasto, are perhaps most immediately redolent of Francis Bacon’s gestural contorting subjects. Similarly to Bacon’s pictures, Placed captures an almost blurred effect due to the movement of the two lovers; the lower figure’s head is shown gliding upwards to meet the kiss planted on her by the upper one. Evocative of the Italian Futurists’ depictions of bustling motion, Bacon and Quarles's renderings have explored painting’s ability to portray activity and gesture.
[i] Christina Quarles, “Tertiary Colors,” Flaunt Magazine, April 6, 2019, online.
[ii] Christina Quarles, quoted in Hettie Judah, “Christina Quarles Paints the Outermost Edges of the Self,” GARAGE Magazine, October 27, 2019, online.
[iii] David Pagel, “Review: Christina Quarles’ paintings blur boundaries and find freedom in the flesh,” Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2019, online. |
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Francis Bacon, Two Figures, 1953. Private Collection, Artwork © 2020 Estate of Francis Bacon / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London |