The View From Here: Elizabeth Hasegawa Agresta's Rainscapes.
The View From Here: Elizabeth Hasegawa Agresta's Rainscapes.
Elizabeth Hasegawa Agresta, Changing Times, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 40 inches, courtesy the artist.
To see Elizabeth Hasegawa Agresta’s damp city scapes, you might be mislead by their origin: while its walls are piled with romantic sturm und drang, her studio is filled with sun and fresh breeze, off a bucolic Connecticut road, amid rock walls and ungrazed pastures. I met Agresta through the Art Students League of New York, and she is perhaps the Platonic ideal member that the League envisioned when it was founded nearly a century and a half ago: not a beginner, not a household name, but a serious artist in the midst of a career, always polishing and sharpening the blade of her incisive mind.
“Polish” is the right word, even though the works are often permeated with fuzzy fog and generous splatter, or what looks like splatter. The sense of natural chaos is misleading, too — her paintings of bridges and towers in the rain are almost abidingly refined. Haloes of paint or medium — I’ve stared at them and spoken to her but I don’t have any idea how she makes them — evince rain on the windshield, or your glasses. When I first looked at her work, I found myself rubbing my eyes as if to get past all the atmosphere— a welcome feeling — but the things are so deep and layered, I soon relaxed into it: it’s atmosphere all the way down.
They also appear to be monochromatic at first glance — she mused that though she didn’t think she was playing into her Japanese heritage, she found her work gravitating toward at least a superficial resemblance to a traditional Japanese landscape scroll. She’s not running from that heritage, but I did note that Agresta’s long/wide landscapes are exactly perpendicular to the traditional tall/thin scrolls. And on top of that, they’re not monochrome, after your eyes adjust, you see lovely hues emerge from the haze — purply grays over this toll booth; warm, classicizing raw sienna over a marshland. The colors are so subtly balanced that the gray itself loses its monochromatic quality. There are no true blacks, no true whites, and every shade between discloses a chromatic secret.
At least I think it’s a painting of a marshland — Agresta was kind enough not to correct me. The work speaks for itself, if you quiet down and listen. She cites several instructors at the League — Peter Bonner, Peter Reginato, and Gregg Kreutz — but an off-hand comment about one work, a dim, subtle oil on metal, gave me more insight into her work. She mentioned just looking out the window on long car trips growing up in the Pacific Northwest. That explained a lot to me: the sense of staring out the window, trying to make out the hazy forms in the distance — a cloud? A mountain? A bridge? The imagination of a seatbelted child is dramatic and indistinct, and the dramatic weather of Agresta’s cloudscapes and rain-puddles feels safely insulated from menace and moisture: it’s all on the other side of the window. That her pictures can feel like both a wet night and warm blanket at the same time is perhaps the most mystifying and gratifying balance in her work.
There’s a quality of the specificity of the sites of her work — she also paints lovely sunny-drenched plein air canvases in Fairfield County, Connecticut — but it’s a passing specificity. In her painting of one of New York’s bigger bridges, the suspension tower hulks in the darkness while the bank of EZ-pass readers at its foot take center stage. My read is that the EZ-pass, central though it is, is not the focal point of the picture. It is that hopeful and melancholic feeling:
Are we there yet?
A selection of Agresta’s works can be found here and at her website.
In other gallery news, we’re pleased to announce that Los Angeles County Museum of Art has acquired a portfolio of Neelon Crawford’s photogravures. Rolling Stone Magazine recently named artist Marissa Paternoster one of the 150 greatest guitarists of all time.
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
Jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com