Mernet Larsen

• Illustration — Mernet Larsen, Explanation, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 41" x 52", 2007. Collection of the Rose Art Museum. In 1999, Larsen adopted an approach that reversed the direction of early modernists by translating abstract paintings into precise, more clearly representational and recognizable—if highly constructed—narrative and figurative works. The new paintings combined cool, creamy color schemes and a unique method that seamlessly integrated acrylic paint, cut-and-painted tracing paper and manipulated textures. They depicted a parallel semiotic universe of horizon-less, tilting panoramas and situations frozen in time and populated by characters that married abstract planes of color to well-observed figuration and detail (e.g., The Writer, 2001). Reviews would describe the work as surreal, disorienting and metaphorically complex in its juxtapositions of non-sequitur humor and foreboding, upended perception and de-familiarized everyday life. In 2005, Larsen exhibited this work at the New York Studio School, a show that New York Observer critic Mario Naves wrote, displayed "a deep-seated originality" in its mix of absurdism, surprising quietude and diverse influences. Following that exhibition and another at Regina Rex in Queens (2011), Larsen gained widespread recognition with her Manhattan gallery debut, "Three Chapters", a three-part show at Johannes Vogt Gallery in 2012. By that time, she had introduced more disruptive compositions that rejected a singular viewpoint and employed reverse perspective—a system common to Roman and Byzantine icon painting and the spatial conundrums of artists Al Held and M. C. Escher, in which elements enlarge (rather than shrink) as they recede from the picture plane. John Yau described these paintings as adhering to a singular logic governed by Larsen's "imaginative synthesis and restating of radically different artists and traditions [that] do not jibe with traditional spatial relationships but fit together like overpasses, cloverleaves, service roads, and on-ramps." The painted scenarios in that show—and a subsequent one at Various Small Fires (2015)—ranged from banal (exercising, domestic life, meetings, café and mall trips) to quixotic (religious happenings, war rooms) to cryptic (a stork hovering over a woman in mall holding a baby aloft in Mall Event, 2010; the vaguely ominous Chainsawer and Bicyclist, 2014). Typical were several paintings of faculty and organizational meetings, such as Explanation and Committee (both 2007) or Tanks (2006), with figures depicted in slumped postures and distorted perspectives and scales that seemed to allude to endemic, underlying psychological or social aspects, such as recurrent and petty power struggles, conformity, boredom and absurdity. Reviewers suggested that a key to the work was Larsen's apparent ability to imbue the protagonists and situations with warmth, distilled emotion and specificity—despite the high degree of stylization—through a constellation of selectively attended to, telling details, an eye for the textured surfaces and the effects of light upon them, and the expressive possibilities of spatial arrangement. • Illustration — Mernet Larsen, Mall Event, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 50" x 55", 2010. Artcritical identified a new lightness of spirit on Larsen's exhibition "Things People Do" (James Cohan, 2016), most visible in the emergence of her figures from meetings to the outdoors (e.g., Frontier, 2015), a shift from the claustrophobic, "uniquely pressurized sensation" of some of her previous work. Her exhibition "Situation Rooms" (Cohan, 2018) displayed greater complexity in compositions such as Cabinet Meeting (with Coffee), a disorienting, fish-eye depiction of fantastically small to impossibly large figures in gravity-defy postures that seemed "to dramatize anxiety’s perception-skewing effects" according to The New Yorker. John Yau wrote that Larsen was "simultaneously critical, satirical, and tender" towards these figures that seemed frozen in stiff bodies and isolated, noting an eye for dry, matter-of-fact humor and absurdity that revealed "issues of conformity, hierarchy, and power relationships with straight-faced glee" (e.g., Situation Room (Scissors, Rocks, Paper)). Her 2021 show at James Cohan consisted of paintings whose compositions directly referenced constructivist artist El Lissitzky. New York Times critic Jillian Steinhauer described the show as one in which "the mundane moment becomes unfamiliar and metaphysical, like a view of reality exploded from within," with angular abstract forms and bisecting planes yielding narrative scenes that were funny (a rooster being handed off to a monk), ominous (a man on a beach with a gun), or cosmic (an astronaut floating in front of a planet). It included works such Solar System, Explained (after El Lissitzky)—a radiating array of shapes offering a bird's-eye view of figures lounging in a circular banquette decorated with a Sputnik-era astronomical model—and Intersection (after El Lissitzky) (both 2020), which depicted a man in a wheelchair walking a dog while overlooking a vortex-like, textured, aerial view of a truck and verdant farmland. Mario Naves characterized Larsen's reworking of space as "linear perspective … thrown under the bus and then reconfigured as origami" that "divests El Lissitzky’s art of philosophical heavy-breathing and uses it as an imprimatur for wit, wonder, and representation."