Highs don’t always have to be fast or trippy, or so Angela Heisch claims with her new body of paintings featured in the ‘Low Speed Highs’ exhibition. These abstract oil on linen canvases give rise to a symphony of planetary spheres nestled in slender curves. Throughout these otherworldly visions, the artist’s crisp lines and precise compositions use light and shadow to establish an architectural resonance that speaks to the history of metaphysical painting and its penchant for the allegory. (Think of Giorgio de Chirico’s arcades and shady squares, or Carlo Carrà’s dreamlike environments.) A break in the clouds (all works cited, 2022) is rich in ocher hues from what could be a scorching sun seen from a skylight or the titular glade. From another perspective, the painting suggests a twilight skyline, accessible if only you could enter the trompe-l’oeil space and navigate a dark purple room. In Floating densitya tan orange blends softly with hues of moss green, creating a floating oval mass that seems to twist on itself like a Mobius strip.
The evocation of movement is the key to this group of works; Heisch’s largest paintings to date, they clearly propose a relationship to the viewer’s body. From the baroque scrolls that make our eyes turn in circles, to the rhythmic playground of repeated shapes, to the vaporous lines of pale pink and milky white that tenderly swell like balloon strings, these images will allow us to leave reality, to imagine gliding along spirals, passing through prisms, hovering in space and drifting through celestial gases. Keep on going . . . take a hit.
