Secrets of Self Mastery

Julia Schwadron Marianelli solo exhibition April + May 2021

Julia Schwadron Marianelli, The Secrets of Self Mastery

written by Jared Stanley

            Julia Schwadron Marianelli’s new show covers fifteen years of painting, and includes work produced in two very particular places, Brooklyn and South Lake Tahoe. The pictures vary widely in scale, and though the subject matter ranges widely as well, the searching quality of this painter’s attention unites the work. Her eye is steady, but it roves (she’s looking for something), moving between careful attention and loopy, feral imagination: she’s a painter whose sensitivity manifests in surfaces and overlays.

The Melhop Gallery has a narrow entryway, and Schwadron Marianelli’s huge (102” x 66”)  Secrets of Self-Mastery looms over visitors as we enter. It’s a bold and sharply self-questioning painting, and the decision to hang it in the entry brings this painter’s concerns to the fore. Dating from 2009, it’s a big, distorted repainting of the jacket cover of a late-50s self-help book. Schwadron Marianelli uses scale, gestural brushwork, and raw linen to present a woozy effect: while the painted words promise clarity and revelation, a sense that all problems will be solved within its pages, the brushstrokes make this confidence slip into slurred speech, and the clarity is interrupted; what’s left behind is an afterimage of the desire to, as the title would have it, master the self.     

Schwadron Marianelli treats the tattered cover of this book as a landscape. You feel the traces of its readers’ hands in the geologic depiction of a rip on the top left edge, in the exposed raw linen underneath, in the gestural slipping of the letters. The book has been worn out by those in need of answers, and Schwadron Marianelli chooses to represent the traces left by this history of reading, rather than the answers themselves. It’s a painting of big questions and big feelings.

            When Schwadron Marianelli moved to Tahoe in 2012 with her young family, her work moved away from the reproductions and elegiac paintings that flirt with the still life (the skeletal and grief-riven two-color painting in the What’s Left Over series, from 2006), into work that has become steadily more interested in a visionary concentration on the world outside. Working in Tahoe and the Sierras poses a great challenge for any artist. Are the dangers of the picturesque anywhere more evident, especially to a painter? What do you do with the place like this, a place so trampled, paved, made easy? I guess you could paint drunk people walking down the street with a beer or something. Schwadron Marianelli, though, is not that kind. Her paintings are in earnest, and so, rather than taking the easy, ironical position, she follows her eye. Instead of looking out toward the mountains and vistas, she looked down.    

It’s an elegant solution, looking down, an unforced approach. An active trail runner, the artist gathers images while running: If you have ever run on a trail, you know you have to keep your eyes on the ground or you’ll hurt yourself. (She recently texted me a bloody photo of one such moment).

 In High Country #2, we come to see how the layering of tree litter in an environment – one as dangerously fire-suppressed as Tahoe – can be a strong figure for the power of underbrush to protect and to conceal. Schwadron Marianelli paints on top of screen-printed chambray denim, which contains the word ‘EVERYTHING’ in an abstract, repeated pattern. Over this base, she paints a thin layer of hot colors, drifting from gauzy mauve to coral accents. Schwadron Marianelli then overlays an arrangement of tree litter and dead branches, yellow orange and brown-black. This method of layering depictions of natural objects on top of a pattern of repeated language is fascinating, especially when the word repeated in the pattern is EVERYTHING. With this hot, feverish palette painted directly over the two-tone pattern language, the painting vibrates with an overwhelming amount of information. This is the heart of Schwadron Marianelli’s painting – everything’s here – indeed, the play of color beefed up in layers, is everything –you can look beneath it, you can look around it.  

In Night Tangle, we find the painter abandoning the visual vocabulary of language, moving into more visionary, stranger territory. This painting, oil and acrylic on denim, uses a similar layering technique as the High Country paintings, but because of the depth of color afforded by painting on raw denim, the wild colors – a near periwinkle twig, a yellow-white one, another a mottled combination of the two – seem to emerge out of the painting, both sitting on top and interwoven within. Though still working with the arrangement of tree litter, the background of this painting substitutes letters for a repeated motif of hazy bumps, concentric rings, and gauzy circles, the colors fading off into the deep blue of the denim, evoking the thousand eyes of a peacock’s tail, richly emerging from a heavy indigo. Layering is still paramount here, but the painter has moved into following the languorous shapes her eye gathers into a more imaginal territory. I recently read that Orthodox icons are not meant to be viewed. Their saints and Madonnas are looking AT YOU. And when looking at Night Tangle, Schwadron Marianelli achieves something delirious like that – a sense that the painting’s layering, like the POV shots in certain horror movies, are about being seen as much as seeing. I hope you are lucky enough to be observed by these paintings.                    

Jared Stanley is a poet and writer who often collaborates with visual artists. He lives in Reno.

You can find more of Jared’s work on his website here or on instagram @jared_stanley_studio

 Artist Statement

Painting has been my way of searching for meaning, layering images that reference both mental and perceptual landscapes, and interrogating notions of how we understand our shifting individual and cultural environments. 

Images of flowers, leaves or rocks correlate to brush strokes and the surfaces operate as either mirror or portal – depending on the way the marks either arrive out of the substrate or form layers to travel down into it. Through careful observation of my subjects, I imagine my paintings as records of my material explorations but also as opportunities for the viewer to experience a collapsing of boundaries between internal and external worlds. Similarly, a book can be a portal. By using self-help book cover design and language as subjects for paintings, I mean to point to what will always remain unknowable and unimaginable even in what professes to give us answers. Painting is not my way of creating a picture that settles, but rather one that continues to vibrate. 

 “What’s Left Over” series were made in 2006 and are all oil on linen, using white paint on a black ground, and evoke the photographic negative, a photogram, or an x-ray. Unlike a photograph, these paintings are made by hand, scaled up in direct response to individual bouquets of dried flowers. Each painting in the series measures 54” x 90”, enforcing a relation to a human scale. The white paint on the black surface is transparent in parts, and the brushstrokes are present as evidence of potential life left inside what is already dead. 

In many works, I’ve used language as a visual element that also infuses meaning.  In more recent works, I’ve moved from found phrases to my own words or compilations. The text matrix as the first layer is meant as a place holder for thought as well as a functional structure to organize the painting itself. 

The most recent series of works in this show, loosely titled, “High Country” initiate from a glimpse of a color or texture I observe outside (or drag inside). When I moved to Tahoe from Brooklyn, it took me several years to figure out how to see my new surroundings. Much of this process felt related to the difference between accepting “landscape” as an idea, versus actually having something personal to say about it, especially in this quintessentially beautiful place. I began trail running and that activity became the mode by which I felt a strong first-person observational power.

Since I moved here my work has become colorful and highlights components or sections of what I see outside in my new location. These paintings feature possible arrangements on the forest floor, parts of a whole, and the impossibility of wrapping one’s head around some definition of nature. I think about how we can only just comment on a momentary slice of what we perceive as the “natural environment.” We can never nail it down, and the idea that we might be able to is human hubris. It reminds me of the idea that we might ever know ourselves well enough through a codified pursuit of “self-help” to feel that we’ve arrived at a mastery of the self.

Julia Schwadron Marianelli