Sylvia Pilmack Mangold
Tuesday, 27 August 2013
From top to bottom: Untitled (View of Schunnemunk Mountain) (1980), The Maple Tree (1992-93), Trees at Pond (1983), The Maple Tres (Summer) (2006)
“Sylvia Plimack Mangold is the sort of admirable artist who discusses cobalt violet oil paint as if it were as tasty as crème fraîche. This is only partly a matter of visual delectation. She has been drawing and painting the trees on her property for over three decades, and this simple yet consuming project has caused her to develop a masterful sensitivity to the materials she uses.
Plimack Mangold’s work in the 1970s was laden with self-referential impulses that pushed her otherwise straight-forward realist paintings into conceptual territory. Landscape 1977, the earliest painting in this 30-year survey of the artist’s landscapes and trees, is a snowy view painted on paper that is held by masking tape to a canvas; rulers are adhered along its left and bottom edges. But what appears first as an assemblage is in fact trompe l’oeil: the tape and rulers are painted. While paying homage to artists of illusionistic tableaux like William Harnett, Plimack Mangold’s own artifice forces the viewer into a philosophical mode. Are the rulers illusions, strictly speaking, if they are marking off literal inches of height and width? Does the tape refer to the artist’s process or is it a fiction through and through?
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This testing against visual experience brings Cézanne and Morandi to mind, but another important influence was Lovis Corinth, whose works Plimack Mangold began to acquire in the mid-’80s. Corinth devoted a suite of etchings and drawings to a single tree, and Plimack Mangold followed suit with her own drypoints and aquatints that presage The Elm Tree ( Winter). The probity and atmosphere in these are gripping. The same is true of her work in watercolor, which shares a similar precision, ensuring that her broader treatment in the oils has some discipline behind it. After years of emphasizing branches and the spaces between them, Plimack Mangold produced an image of a tree thick with foliage. Summer Maple 2009 is a delightful tangle of verdure, put down with lusciousness and aplomb on a wide rectangle. Winter Maple (2012) contrasts the tree’s limbs, bare again, against an evergreen pine behind it. A visual mode has supplanted the philosophical one, leaving the artist to work unimpeded with shape, color and the integrity of careful looking.”
-Franklin Einspruch for Art in America