“As if I were leaving this life and had to take with me only a very few concrete images: this is what it was, not good, not bad, just what stood out. Not ephemeral, not photo or film-like, but memory turned into object, monumentalized.” — Mernet Larsen
Various Small Fires (VSF) is pleased to present Chainsawer, Bicyclist and Reading in Bed, the west coast solo debut of painter Mernet Larsen (b. 1940).
For decades, Larsen exhibited almost exclusively in her home state of Florida. It is only in the past several years that critics, curators, and artists outside of the Southeast have discovered the significance of her distinctive oeuvre. As if extruding cubism through a 21st Century prism, Larsen’s extreme yet rigorous geometric and perspectival distortions complicate the discourse of representational painting and provide context for a younger generation of painters such as Dana Schutz and Avery Singer.
With a combination of impossible perspectives, angular abstraction, and improvisational textures, Larsen’s paintings echo those of Constructivist masters Malevich and El Lissitzky, but have also been related to emaki (Japanese scroll painting), early Sienese perspectival painting, and the proto-Surrealist paintings of Giorgio de Chirico.
In Chainsawer, Bicyclist, and Reading in Bed, Larsen captures encounters among seemingly alienated individuals, ranging from mundane to portentous, each composed as a wry paradox of distress and detachment.
