Angela Fraleigh: forever is not enough
Inman Gallery
- John Devine -
Eros, the Greek god of sexual passion, was one of the eldest gods, believed to be a contemporary of primeval Chaos. In some legends he caused the union of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth), bringing life into being. According to Aristophanes, Eros was the son of Erebus, the primordial darkness, and Nyx, our more quotidian Night; he brought humankind into existence. Poet and novelist Robert Graves tells us that Eros was considered irresponsible and therefore not permitted to dwell with the other Olympians—an amusing notion given the amorous adventures of that randy bunch—but the Greeks were onto something. Unruly Eros is life, the force that pushes the flowering weed through concrete and spreads the vine over ruins. In humans, it manifests as desire and libido and is an essential part of our inner lives. Because erotic desire is always confounded, its satisfaction is always fleeting and, thus, always engendered anew. Regulation and redirection are required; otherwise, we would never get anything done (hence, Eros’ irresponsibility). Desire must be circumscribed, regulated, sublimated and redirected, in some societies through religious and cultural taboos and through economic activity—unless, of course, one is an artist.
Angela Fraleigh, before it had a name, 2005
Oil on panel
72 x 96 inches
Angela Fraleigh’s first Houston-area solo outing at Inman Gallery, forever is not enough, is comprised of six oil-on-panel paintings, each 6-x-8 feet. The simplest description is that these paintings depict figures swimming—or drowning—in colorful seas of abstraction. The dominant figures are female; in more ways than the obvious, these are self-portraits, though the artist provokes a little redirection by noting in her gallery talk that she and her mother look a lot alike.
As suggested, she is not depicted alone, though the male companion who figures in most of the paintings is, generally, obscured. What is not obscured is the activity they are engaged in—highly intimate though sufficiently indeterminate as to forestall the vice squad.
Fraleigh was born in 1976 in Beaufort, South Carolina. In an artist statement for a group show last spring, she described a bit of her early life: her mother, very young and unmarried; her parents hiding marijuana plants behind the kiddy pool because the babysitter’s husband was a narc; moving into a “nice” trailer when her mother and father split up; the television being “a godsend” because it showed her mother “how it was supposed to be”—life, that is.
Fraleigh earned a BFA from Boston University in 1998 and an MFA from Yale in 2003, both in painting. She has spoken of the difficulty of being a painter in an academic environment that has not, of late, been overly encouraging of the practice—not that she needs encouragement. These works are masterful, passionate, agonistic paintings. Fraleigh limns her subjects in naturalistic detail. Continuing a prior body of work, her figures suggest something between eighteenth century portraitist and landscapist Thomas Gainsborough and the bodice-ripping cover art of romances novels. She then pours paint directly onto the surface of her portraits—over the figures—and manipulates each pool of paint to obscure her meticulous figuration.
This is where a sense of passionate struggle comes in, as the artist wrestles with these large panels, trying to direct the paint where she wants it. Often enough, she picks up the brush again to adjust the flow of poured paint, to cover or focus on aspects of these figures’ passionate struggles. These abstract washes seem cognate with the inchoate nature of desire—the vague, the amorphous—yet are profound in this lack. Sometimes, as in i hold these memories as if they were my own, paint gathers forming little sculptural ridges as if to achieve some materialization for indistinct yearnings, while from the lower edge of before it had a name, a blob of red oil paint hangs in testament to the difficulty—or, perhaps, the improbability—of containing amorous yearnings.
Which is why, fortunately, Fraleigh will keep painting. Eros cannot be contained. Desire presses us all forward, but none so urgently as the artist. Even that coolest and most cerebral of Modernism’s customers, Marcel Duchamp, acknowledged the primacy of Eros in the creative process and its continual—and necessary—frustration. Fraleigh will return to the studio and renew the struggle for a moments transcendence: that moment when all is as it’s supposed to be and for which forever would never be enough.