Amorphous, dripping body parts spill across a yellow and black checkered floor in Christina Quarles’ Floored. Created in 2017, the year of the artist’s first ever solo exhibition, which launched her to widespread critical acclaim, Floored displays Quarles’ signature, undefinable bodies, bending and intersecting across a spliced picture plane, in a ripe visual synthesis of the multiple, shifting aspects of the self. Subverting the trope of the female nude in art history, Quarles’ paintings upend our preconceived notions of race, gender, and space.

 

As a “queer, cis woman who is black but is often mistaken as white,” Quarles is fascinated by the dissonance between how one’s identity is perceived, and how one perceives oneself.ⁱ Her distorted and fragmented figures register the contradictions between external and internal perceptions of self, through a “layering of information [which] bypasses singularity for simultaneity.”ⁱⁱ In Floored, it is challenging to discern how many figures are splayed across the floor—and which limbs belong to which person. Quarles eschews anatomical reality in order to paint “portraits of living within a body,” as she says; touching, feeling, moving—the seven-fingered hand stroking the face at upper left, for instance, registers how it feels to be touched from within the body, feeling fingers curve and brush against skin.ⁱⁱⁱ

 

The artist relishes the ambiguity of her figures, and the way in which her compositions encourage the viewer look closely and puzzle out each body. “I like to play with the desire I think we all have to complete the image, and whenever possible, to complete it into a figure,” she explains.^iv The viewer assumes, based on the presence of recognizable features, like the hands, feet, and breasts in Floored, that Quarles’ forms are all body parts; Quarles hopes to introduce just enough ambiguity to her compositions to “nudge people enough in the direction of questioning their initial assumptions.”^v

 

 

The division of space in Floored, too, adds to the perceived ambiguity of the composition. As Quarles shares, she begins each painting with the fragmented shapes and abstract brushstrokes that will become her figures. Once these shapes are “fleshed out” on canvas, she pauses, photographs the work, and then takes it into Adobe Illustrator, where she digitally draws over the photograph to place “the patterns and the planes and the areas that really start to interrupt the figure.”^vi After this digital intervention, Quarles returns to the canvas to complete the work; the splicing of her figures across planes, then, is quite literally built into her painting process, as she shifts from canvas, to computer screen, and back again. The figure(s) of Floored exist in three planes of reality at once—the pink sky, the checkered floor, and a murky, subterranean layer of hazy yellow and grey.

 

Quarles’ ambitions to upend assumptions about figurative painting are inherently antipatriarchal, antiracist, and queer. With a traditional canon dominated by paintings of nude women by white men, Quarles’ queer gaze, like that of Mickalene Thomas or Jenna Gribbon, calls into question the power dynamics of her figurative representations. The practice of figure drawing—which Quarles has participated in since the age of twelve—relies on direct observation, and rewards the artist who is best able to see the physical body before them. Quarles’ figures, with their twisting limbs, extra fingers, and blue-grey shadows, overlap and intersect in ways that defy any sense of figural reality; these are “bodies that resist a fixing gaze.”^vii

 

 

ⁱ Christina Quarles, quoted in Christina Quarles, Matrix 271, exh. brochure, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, 2018, online.

ⁱⁱ Andrew Bonacina, “In Likeness,” in Christina Quarles, exh. cat., The Hepworth Wakefield, 2019, p. 25.

ⁱⁱⁱ Quarles, quoted in “Intimacy, Unknowing, and Discovery: David J. Getsy in conversation with Christina Quarles,” ibid., p. 34.

^iv Ibid.

^v Ibid.

^vi Ibid., p. 31.

^vii Bonacina, ibid.