Lillian Supanich

In Weeping Women, subjects are not simply given, they are constructed and taken apart all at once. They’re revealed to us in pieces. Lillian Supanich approaches painting knowing it can hold ambivalence or outright contradiction; knowing it can embrace messiness. Messy oppositions between legibility and illegibility, construction and decay, and surface and depth each compete in her work. Central to Weeping Women is another uncertainty: the rule of a strict naturalistic order vs a slippage of such rigid representative methods into a delirious ‘dumbness’ (as artist and educator Adolph Rosenblatt might have put it).

The title, Weeping Women, is lifted from the Modernist trope of broken-down, fractured and failing women but offers a contemporary, queer reading of this embodiment. The painted figures, denied a stable self, have no unified inner essence to reveal. Through painterly executions she returns to ideas of subject formation from a queer and psychoanalytic lens guided by the work of Julia Kristeva and Lee Edelman.

Supanich’s women are painted from still lifes staged in torn and glued paper--out of parts-- further reassembled (re-presented) in paint. The drips of color begin another process of decay: a loosening of representative order that points back to the indeterminacy of the paint.

Painted with suggestive marks and hazy, layered atmospheres, borrowing historical methods of paint application, the models come in and out of wholeness. One cannot always distinguish how shapes relate, how they’re grouped or where objects begin and end. Wherever distinctions and groupings fail, abjection bleeds into us. Supanich approaches these moments, in her own words, “as an opportunity to luxuriate in both surface texture and illusionistic depth, each lush in their painterly application.”