Christina Quarles’ paintings, drawings, and installations grapple with the limits of legibility and language in the fraught politics of bodies marked by race, gender, sexuality, and identity. Quarles’ paintings depict an excess of gestures in jarring pigments consisting of drips, lines, smears, and scrapes made with combs or dry brushes. With a background in graphic design, the artist pairs the fortuitous effects of dripping and seemingly improvisational brushstrokes with digital manipulation and laser-cut stencils. Her sinuous bodies contort, conjuring a sense of intimacy, fluidity, and the impossibility of outlining singular beings, as in the entwining figures in Hangin’ There, Baby (2021), the array of frenzied pigments in Gone on Too Long (2021), or the figures chaotically pulling at, pushing away, and stepping over each other in Just a Lil’ Longer (2021). Geometrical planes and architectural devices that allude to domestic environments, such as the curtain in (Who Could Say) We’re Not Jus’ as We Were (2021), centre depthless forms in space by framing gangly figures. In Had a Gud Time Now (Who Could Say) (2021), the extremities of subjects penetrate, sink, and emerge from a spatial plane depicted as a gingham tablecloth. As if pushing up against and trying to exceed the boundaries of the frame, the bodies suggest an alternative physicality defined by ambiguity.
Liv Cuniberti
