Alexandra Noel at Antenna Space

Artist: Alexandra Noel

Exhibition title: Funny Looking

Venue: Antenna Space, Shanghai, China

Date: June 12 – July 23, 2021

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai

Freefall.

The horizon line provides a handrail, all important to making spatial sense. Without it, pilots in fog pull up into stalls, plummet, wondering if they’re ascending. Scuba divers in open water – at night in black voids – get lost in blue abyss and die swimming endlessly left. You are taught to build your own horizon line, fill your goggles with a small amount of ocean, to form a water level, follow this line out of the abyss. A line Noel’s paintings carefully loses and reestablishes with a strange power.

The cakes have almost no horizon. We drift over their iced plains, like looming frosted moons or space stations – like we’re approaching in small spacecraft. Candles like aeronautical runway lights. A fly adrift in frosting porn. An ambigu-ous ground. Like postmodern architecture: a spatial cubism causing the elderly to struggle balancing against angles not right, and grandma tumbled. Noel’s are that paused feeling before the fall, held momentarily together before coasters spin over the cathedral’s edge. Viewers bent over at the hip, looking up, at an underneath, to find the painting a different color.

Like tornados frozen in the distance, pedestalized on the horizon line. They are funnels on a plinth, asking for interpre-tation, a consideration of their possibility: a world to be swept away. “God’s finger.” Tornados are surrealism: homes topsy turvy, apples through heads, trees dangling clocks, a cow prepped for liftoff. Reality twistered into confetti. Held by the horizon line at the distance of the sublime.

What is desire in a world in freefall, in a confusion of materials, image. Cake with a shelf life as long as your life. Candles from 1 to 100, How do I cut this? Noel sends me a cartoon, animated babies unable to differentiate between cartoon ice cream and a cartoon sign for ice cream. In that world, the substance is the same: cartoon. We the audience “know” a difference, but there isn’t one, it is all image. Cakes as images, the illuminated sign of food porn and the disappointment at the real bloody thing. Like advertising photography replacing milk with poly-vinyl glue, mashed potatoes for ice cream, there is a confusion at heart. We want the cake in the TV. They look the same but their edibility value is less. Ice Cream Mountain Cake’s mountain of gustation prevented by a thick frost of paint. The material of the world at the whim of various winds. Cake as image, or as martian landscape.

Peculiarity rides a line – it is hard to write, worse, explain. It exists in some nebulous space that is inarticulate. Between things. This is the pollution of confusion – no blinding fog but a fouling air of inarticulate wrongness. Of an even lighting that still doesn’t reveal. Of dislocation. What disorients in one painting is repaired in another: lost footing is given firm ground in another. A size asking for intimacy, looking into worlds we can’t quite swallow.

There’s a turmoil underlying all this, the moonscape cakes, the tornadic plains, painterly fields. The peculiar ground is always shifting. A Vampire at Home would insinuate the red daubs as blood, but there’s an uncertainty at the scale of the gore – is this white square a mere napkin or is this blood spray at architectural levels? And are those teeth looming? The title, We Tell Our Dog What to Do gives clue to the organ-like shapes, but no answer to their sunny park stroll. A children’s book of medical diagrams of dog organs. In another, an Apple Harvest machine appears out of a heavenly Tiepolo smog, the ground indiscernible, the footing lost. Freefall. This inability to quite make scale, sense, uneasy to relate ourselves – can’t even really place ourselves. Sign Holders that hold no sign of function. And diagrams of incest whose interconnected vectors are surely a bad sign. Baby Me would provide the least ambiguous vision, replaced with raw exposure, an infant fragile under medical light, acts as a hesitant question. A tender flesh marbled with painterly question marks.

Surrealism is often a regaling of everything dissonant in the world – made “fun”, the semantic vacancy of the world turned to fanfare for it. You could mistake Noel’s for something surreal. But this isn’t the uncanny of dreams, or the collected flypaper of a cultural unconscious. Not the news. Noel’s are like the wreckage, the disorienting nausea of images of the world before freefall, disintegration. They are the childhood feeling of being lost. Being unable to make the world coherent. Unplaceable. Confronted with cake that’s not for eating. The images fail a consensus that would make them digestible. An intimacy that draws us into a world that won’t resolve itself. Which makes them like fish hooks. A lure for something we know we can’t eat. But luring. The physical fact of a world polluted with confusion. It’s tough to separate smog, separate tornado from an air always capable of deploying confetti.

Alexandra Noel

Alexandra Noel (b. 1989, Columbus, Ohio) lives and works in Los Angeles. She studied at the University of San Diego and Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. Noel’s small-scale paintings reveal uncanny assemblages of images. She concentrates on things depicted in a manner that is both surreal and familiar: newborns, home objects, and suburbia landscapes. She incorporates these aspects into far-flung imagined landscapes, tragic scenarios, and reinvented cinematic moments. The little panels hint on the size difference between human bodies and electronic devices. She zooms in, crops, stretches, and rescales her little panels as if they were images on screen. The audience is invited to view them from a very perspective. Meanwhile, she emphasizes the tension between being sculptural and illusionistic. As a painter, Noel establishes a linguistic parallel to the dystopic and magical themes of her works by writing fiction that resembles the tone of poetry or a movie.

Recent solo exhibitions: Funny Looking, Antenna Space, Shanghai, China (upcoming)；There’s always something, Bodega, New York, US (2019); Just a head, Atlantis, Marseille, France (2019); Master Planned, Freedman Fitzpatrick, Paris, France (2019); Theatre Road, Parker Gallery, Los Angeles, US (2018); Solo presentation with Bodega, The Armory Show, New York, US (2017); From rafters, Bodega, New York, US (2016); Bone-in, Neochrome, Turin, Italy (2016), among others.

Recent group exhibitions: Made in L.A. 2020: a version, Hammer Museum and The Huntington, Los Angeles, US (2021); The Sentimental Organization of the World, Galerie Crèvecoeur, Paris, France (2020); Bolthole, Potts, Los Angeles, US (2019); A Cloth Over a Birdcage, Château Shatto, Los Angeles, US (2019); Metamorphõseõn, Galerie Sultana, Paris, France (2018); Kiss in Tears, Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles, US (2018); Tiger Poems and Songs for Hurricanes, Travesia Cuatro, Guadalajara, Mexico (2018); Annex Showroom, M+B, Los Angeles, US (2018); By the lakeside, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, US (2017); Kill it on vacation, The Steak House Doskoi via XYZ Collective, Tokyo, Japan (2017); Economy Plus, Balice Hertling, Paris, France (2017); Instrument of the Homecoming, The Sunroom, Richmond, US (2016); Commodus Operandi, Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, US (2016); All at Once, with Naoki Sutter-Shudo, Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, US (2016); Aunt Nancy, Night Gallery, Los Angeles, US (2016); El Que Camina Al Lado, Travesia Cuatro, Madrid, Spain (2016); Sara two, Hester, New York, US (2015), among others.

Alexandra Noel, Funny Looking, 2021, exhibition view, Antenna Space, Shanghai

Alexandra Noel, A Vampire at Home, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 30.5 x 61 cm

Alexandra Noel, Apple Harvest, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 20.3 x 25.4 cm

Alexandra Noel, Baby Me, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 12.7 x 10.2 cm

Alexandra Noel, Bowl Bowl Blue, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Panel, 17.8 x 12.7 cm

Alexandra Noel, Cadmium Spill, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Panel, 17.8 x 12.7 cm

Alexandra Noel, Candle Contact, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 22.9 x 30.5 cm

Alexandra Noel, Chasing root, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 10.2 x 7.6 cm

Alexandra Noel, Diaper Rash, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 10.2 x 7.6 cm

Alexandra Noel, End Piece (You and I), 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 12.7 x 30.5 cm

Alexandra Noel, Fruit flies, mosquitos stagger, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 10.2 x 7.6 cm

Alexandra Noel, Gway, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 10.2 x 12.7 cm

Alexandra Noel, Hiding a Hole to Here, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 11.4 x 20.3 cm

Alexandra Noel, How do I cut this, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Panel, 10.2 x 30.5 cm

Alexandra Noel, Ice Cream Mountain Cake, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 12.7 x 17.8 cm

Alexandra Noel, Incest in the Wild in the Snow, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 25.4 x 20.3 cm

Alexandra Noel, It’s a, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 10.2 x 12.7 cm

Alexandra Noel, Kiddie Table, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 12.7 x 17.8 cm

Alexandra Noel, Leek Stew, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 10.2 x 7.6 cm

Alexandra Noel, Miniature Horses, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 20.3 x 25.4 cm

Alexandra Noel, Pie, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Panel, 7.6 x 10.2 cm

Alexandra Noel, Plate, 2021, Wood Panel, Wood, Enamel, Flashe Paint, Acrylic Paint

Alexandra Noel, Quelle Heure Est-il, Pumpkin, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Panel, 10.2 x 7.6 cm

Alexandra Noel, Rainbow Ground, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 11.4 x 61 cm

Alexandra Noel, Sign Holders, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 15.2 x 10.2 cm

Alexandra Noel, Sliced Cityscape, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Panel, 8.9 x 17.8 cm

Alexandra Noel, Sprinkle, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 10.2 x 7.6 cm

Alexandra Noel, Squash, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 10.2 x 7.6 cm

Alexandra Noel, Storm Squatting with George, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 10.2 x 12.7 cm

Alexandra Noel, Two Peas and an Army, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Panel, 10.2 x 7.6 cm

Alexandra Noel, We tell our dog what to do, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 7.6 x 10.2 cm (3 Panels)

Alexandra Noel, We’ve got sisters, we’ve got cow, 2021, Oil and Enamel on Wood, 8.9 x 17.8 cm