Elise Ansel | wall window table light

Cadogan Gallery is pleased to announce Elise Ansel’s ninth solo exhibition with the gallery, wall window table light, featuring new paintings that continue her sustained engagement with the work of Johannes Vermeer. About In wall window table light, Ansel focuses on Vermeer’s images of women near windows, immersed in light, translating these Old Master paintings into a contemporary visual language. The title refers both to Vermeer’s subject matter and to the relationship between painting as a tangible object and the early modern idea of painting as a window or portal into illusory space. Light is central to Ansel’s exploration of Vermeer and his use of the camera obscura. Extending this into the present, she uses digital tools to crop, blur, enlarge, layer, and manipulate source images before translating them through a tactile process of stretching and pulling transparent layers of paint across a physical surface. Digital files and pixelated images become contemporary equivalents of the grids and lenses used by earlier painters. Working with a limited palette of predominantly transparent red, green, and blue, and a consistent compositional structure, the paintings engage the seriality of photography and Minimalism. Within these constraints, Ansel explores variation, repetition, chance, and renewal. As Ansel describes her process: “It is in the slippage between intention and execution, the incidental accidents that occur during the painting process, the failure to translate correctly, the curvature of time, that new territory is gained and a deeper connection with the Old Master source is forged.” Read more Toggle Painting