Jenny Gagalka: All day I dream about sex Sometimes after dinner I dream again

by guest Spleen: Matthew Kerkhof

Hey Spleenlets, it’s been a minute, huh? Well now that your faithful critic has enjoyed a summer spent in parks and on patios, I am back for what promises to be a jam packed nightmare return to full Chicago exhibition season this September. Today also marks our first ever review written by a guest writer, the ever erudite Matthew Kerkhof. Jenny Gagalka’s exhibition closed at Good Weather’s Chicago joint a few weeks ago, but select paintings from the show will find themselves on view this Friday, Saturday and Sunday in Marseille, France for Art-O-Rama.

Special thanks to Matthew for his thoughts, words, and most of all patience in the time it took me to edit and return his labors to the land of the living.

---

In an industrial building on the west side of Chicago, Jenny Gagalka has installed a show at Good Weather (Chicago) that includes two series of medium to large scale paintings. Made with Flashe on canvas or linen, the paintings are cropped images of athletic hats and shoes, zoomed in to the point of near abstraction. They are a pleasure to look at: painterly paintings made up of color and line, shadow and light. The way the Flashe is applied highlights its specific qualities: opaque, smooth, and refined. The colors blend together with a creamy, unique texture and a flatness that recalls frosting on desserts, or the play of sunlight on plaster. There is a seduction to these qualities, something sweet and architectural. There are a few distracting moments of decoration, as well, but as a whole the application of paint feels integral, as if the images were sculpted as much as painted. 

To emphasize, these are painter’s paintings, rich with art historical references. The color palette—earthy reds, yellows, and oranges, complemented with cooler blues, greens, and purples—attracts me, and my mind ventures to landscapes and wilderness: mountains, waterfalls, and mud. Paul Gaugain’s Tahitian landscapes; or Henri Matisse and his flat volumes and ideas of color as containing device and boundary. The panels of color—the treatment of color as semi-defined regions—coupled with the cropped, zoomed-in views evokes Georgia O’Keeffe, the folds of a baseball cap substituting for the folds of a flower petal. 

The title of the show, All day I dream about sex Sometimes after dinner I dream again, is a post-hoc acronym for the sports brand Adidas. Some of the paintings have clear identifiers—like an LA Dodgers hat—speaking to a specific place. Others are generic, no brand. Personally, I love pop culture and athletic apparel, but the moments in the paintings where these references appear are distracting, pulling me away from the emotion and power of the color palette and forms. I wonder about the significance of these references, their specificity, and find myself lost as if listening to someone give directions on the interstates of Southern California.

The works are presented serially: it makes sense if these concrete, physical referents are simply a mechanism, a way to begin to make paintings from direct observation that then allude to other ideas. As a viewer, I wonder if I would be better off left in the dark, unaware of this impetus. When the referents appear more formal and less clear, in the underside of a hat’s top button or its open eyelets, in the snaking of a hat strap, there is more ambiguity and thus something more free.    

2 Red Hats, a diptych along the back wall, is an apt example of Gagalka’s paintings’ best qualities, where the observations I’m making are articulated most clearly. The horizontal painting is framed in a doorway between the larger and smaller gallery spaces with the entire gallery wall to itself. Its scale—the size doubled with the horizontality of the two conjoined canvases—makes it appear even more like a landscape, a view into a different world. It has a magnetic quality to it and I get lost in it, following as details cross the seam between the canvases. It feels expansive, in a manner through which I can journey into something that unfurls, possibly beyond the edge of the painting. As I look closer and the painting-scape grows bigger, I feel enveloped. It functions as a physical and metaphorical finale to the exhibition, a culmination: reaching the peak viewing point after seeing the other paintings on the way.

2 Hats 1 is an outlier, a restrained accompaniment to the rest of the show. The color on this painting is starker than those surrounding it with muted blues and a bright red. The lines are more direct and expressive. They are more jagged and aggressive, the color applied in strikes of movement, not washes and panels of color. This, in combination with the cropping (severe like the others), brings to mind Franz Kline’s expanded brush strokes and experimentation with scale. The subject matter is abstracted to a point where it is unrecognizable. The fabric form of the hat becomes the gaping maw of a comic book villain.

There are moments throughout the exhibition when the referents become fleshy, almost human, even animal. The fabric folds mimic a stomach’s paunch; the eyelets form nipples. The brim of a hat stands in for the bill of a sad duck. These moments where the literal referents are left behind and something else comes to the fore—when I am able to get lost in landscape or question the organic fleshy blur of what it means to be human and animal in the world—are where the work reaches the space that daydreaming unequivocally provokes (and which the exhibition’s title implies), and parallels the undistracted, even beatific feelings where art can transport us. 

– Matthew Kerkhof