Thoughts That Cure Radically: Pamela Jorden ‘Sun and Moon’ Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery

Pamela Jorden’s smart, intimate one person show at Klaus Von Nichtssagend gallery, ‘Sun and Moon’ participates in a generational pictorial malaise dressed in a loose and casual painting application. Jorden’s work, along with several young and mid-career artists, uses painterly abstraction that Roger Fry would have approved of in one of the buoyant, giddy salon d’automnes prior to the outbreak of the First World War. Employing a cool palette of ultramarine blues, umbers, zinc whites and cadmium reds that Jorden casually spreads across small linen surfaces and fabric supports. A light touch prevents her work from becoming overly cerebral or beholden to her sources. Instead her work becomes a part of a larger pattern of investigation, however subtle, into the political moment. Jorden’s ‘Night Owl’, for instance, resembles Robert Delaunay’s ‘Eiffel Tower’ from 1911 in its format, palette and composition. Delaunay’s painting uses Cubist techniques to deconstruct the ultimate symbol of Parisian sophistication, the Eiffel Tower. Jorden uses the same fracture, jagged edges and thrusting compositional momentum as Tour Eiffel. Similarity, however, is not substance. What Jorden’s painting lacks is actual momentum. Jorden, unlike Delaunay, cannot participate in any serious attempt to change consciousness. Historically stymied, Jorden’s studio practice chooses itself. Jorden turns to Delaunay’s pictorial language, with its kinesthetic shape and corporeal touch, not only for its formal splendor, but because such language intimated something catastrophic stealing into its historical moment. Jorden’s paintings, modest, quiet and sincere, transfer each studio decisions into elusive political moments.