Thoughts That Cure Radically: Josephine Halvorson ‘What Looks Back’ Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

A perceptible silence hovers over Josephine Halvorson’s one person exhibition, ‘What Looks Back’ at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Depicting flat monochrome close-ups of plastic bin tops, generators, parts of machines, gears and springs, Halvorson’s work employs a limited subject, chroma, and spatial perspective in her paintings. Despite the limitations placed on her work, it draws on several perceptual and Modernist traditions. Made with a declarative film surface, her work speaks in a similar but distinctly warmer and more personal diction than the painterly language of other contemporary realists such as Luc Tuymans. Similar to Tuymans, Halvorson’s paintings were made in a single sitting but depart from the Belgian in that she paints her work from nature, in what appears to be low twilight. Reaching further back, Halvorson perceives her subjects with the same intentionality as the pair of New Mexico artists Georgia O’Keefe and Agnes Martin. Perception for O’Keefe, Martin and Halvorson entails sustained repetition, bordering on the maniacal edging towards the mystical. Finding immanence in the quotidian, as Halvorson demonstrates, is a uniquely American practice. Seen most clearly in still life, American painters have been practicing embodiment since the early Republic. Starting with Charles Wilson Peale and his entire old master brood, including Rembrandt, Raphael, Titian and Rubens, through recognized and under recognized painters such as Walter Tandy Murch and Tom Wasselman, all display what Emerson counseled in the American Scholar:

Instead of the sublime and beautiful; the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized. That, which had been negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign parts.

Distinctly embodied, Halvorson’s work takes the low, the common, not only as a subject, but as a form of agnostic silence. Descended from a distinctly American spiritual practice stretching back to the Shakers, Halvorson’s work remains silent, unwilling to partake of its nourishment. Halvorson’s work exists—barely—in the same spiritual universe that led Thomas Merton to write, shortly before his death, "The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it." Halvorson’s work, expert and contemporary, lacks belief in its capacity for a similar, sustained experiences as the maker of the Shaker chair. Not disbelief, but agnosticism towards painting’s abilities, is a condition, not a criticism, which Halvorson’s work fully embodies. Silence in an appropriate position for a painter to assume today, as Halvorson mutely demonstrates. Halvorson’s work—warm, immediate, inert—is a homeless worker in the land of nourishment. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.