C104 Review

Edinburgh: Inka Essenhigh at Fruitmarket

Inka Essenhigh: Untitled (tan orange), oil on paper, 2000; courtesy Fruitmarket Gallery

 

"Put the cup down and sit back. Recover." Engulfed in touching colour.

A sideways glance at the second gallery attendant. "Chewing tobacco deliriously cured me in the end," she said.

Essenhigh's paintings cause excitement. A small running track would calm you. The whipping lines and glossy light of cartoonish mutations fill the space. Overwhelming.

Run round and round in circles, then settle to decipher these epic horrors of boneless beings in oil, turbulent with dreamlike charm. Images crumble off eggshell thin surfaces, inward not out. The mind's wanderlust follows sweeping gestures. Glossy reflections ping back from luminous fields without shadow, light from everywhere. Splintered fabric bursts gurneying puppets who rip the floor with loose-stringed movements.

And what topic these forms?

They are what they do, says Essenhigh. A functionalist approach.

Victims of whim, the characters leap and explode to puncture one another. Vague persons slotted behind masks, no more than flesh in warped mirages of unchallenged yearning. Images trembling at the limits of time and space and frame, wanting so much yet being so small. Cartoon-like.

Essenhigh was raised in a self-confessed cultural wasteland, a small town outside New York, but she had TV.

The title on the most red painting reads 'Arrows of Fear'.

Our own invisible heritage, the psychological space off screen. A land of hushing wind and tulips. Bewildering in their fruitfulness. Come on tender, have a suck. The flowers so red. Oily red and sickening too. The tendrils loop like glue and blossoms of anxiety flood the room and pushing your body against the painting may ease the urge for contact.

Inka Essenhigh: White rain, oil and enamel on canvas, 2001,courtesy John Smith and Vicky Hughes Collection, London / Fruitmarket Gallery

 

Between the paintings are drawings, ink on paper.

The drawings convince us that Essenhigh knows the worth of the page. The gaze looking out is it. Without value, over and above the horizon, beyond zeal, calm.

Midnight on a beach, oil on hardboard. The moon is looking back behind you, a hole in black. The optical pop of a sky inverted. Japanese sea waves and mystical whisperings like treacle goo hold the breaker long enough to see its surface, reflection and fabric. The polished, worked paint sanded matt, flat. A creak on the floor, steps behind. A punter wondering at paintings glossy and surprised like snails without shells and frogs without holes. The moon is a silver anagram, Om, no? The stillness is slow and green embers breathe some warmth.

The drawings stand out, wispy and sucked in. They are not insipid. Their vein is drier compared to the oil. Paper-thin and knotted lines, they are completed within the framework allotted. This is practised sucking through a long cold straw: the whistle of line convinced of direction.

Inside these papers, images are held like still smoke strands. Unmoving jos-stick vapours. Dizzying to stare at, the eye spins off without meaning. The image with no object. Tinkering soul without knowledge of heritage. All material stuff and practised movement. No rendezvous with ancient culture here. Only a vague not knowing glaring and gibbering humility. In the olden days they knew very little about anything useless, yet today she stares at the endlessly absurd which is deathly.

These works are the end of playfulness. When exploration turns nasty and no one ever plays again, the ageing process is disguised in gloss. The new is portrayed with a guessing line around it, made whole in our eyes with outline.

Essenhigh detaches us from the fearful universe, the 'woah boy,' and the Chinese cavalry charging across the primitive yellow, yellow trust.

Inka Essenhigh: Personal wlanet, oil on panel, 2002,courtesy Michael and Judy Ovitz Collection, Los Angeles / Fruitmarket Gallery

 

Horses carry off the adult.

You are left in screen space. Rectangular, crude. If you believe in here you might be safe, from illusions of cruelty, and this tense game of time.

In Essenhigh we have many reference points to convince that this is beauty, not madness. Though they may all be after the fact. Ernst, Magritte, Miró, Bacon, Hokusai, Tex Avery. The self-contained luminous worlds of cyberspace all echo in this work. Though she vehemently denies the digital reference, it is the way she treats the plane that suggests the screen. Self-contained, self-referential universes depend upon fixed rules allowing loose narrative and emotive gesture to sit atop their logic. Essenhigh conjures slippery moments of tranquility aghast in seduction.

When you leave an Inka Essenhigh show, you may wish to sleep in technicolour and you will possibly have nightmares.

This is psychological craft. It shapes and massages that which is most dissolute in us. The yonder burden of human-ness, precious and tranquil at heart. Voluptuous and indulgent as a screaming child. Over and over again dashing onto your head like a froth of water.

Dan Norton builds ablab.org.

Inka Essenhigh, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, April/May 2003