Born 1989 | Lives and works in Brooklyn NY, USA
Ellen Antico’s paintings feature Rubenesque figures sprawled in orgiastic piles. Her subjects, voluptuous but seemingly genderless, are unabashed as they engage in ambiguous acts of intimacy. These scenes are not explicit; rather, they revel in suggestion and withholding. The Brooklyn-based artist, who was born in Sydney, Australia, builds up numerous layers of various media to achieve a range of effects. Over dripping, nebulous washes in pastel or acidic hues, she makes confident, searching marks in charcoal, coaxing the forms of her figures out of accumulations of linework. As she paints back into the charcoal — using, variously, oil, watercolor, acrylic, soft pastel, enamel, and Flashe — she introduces a grisaille that seems to reference smudged newspaper or blurred photography. In this way, she nods to the instability of media, or the elasticity of narrative. Adding to this tension is the dulling impact of charcoal on flesh tones; these figures embrace and intertwine, fondle and pet, but in places, the vividness of their complexion has a haunted pallor.
These paintings ultimately read as abstractions, arrangements of writhing and undulating gestures that nevertheless speak to the interconnectedness of bodies, or the networks of labor and care that upkeep bodies. There are stylistic echoes here of Rita Ackermann’s paintings of fashionable sprites, but Antico’s figures are fleshy and thick, rather than nubile. And while Antico’s subjects are confident in their sexuality, their attention is focused toward each other, or inward, rather than on the seduction of the viewer. While some have incomplete features, others knowingly meet the viewer’s eye — but this gaze reads as a challenge, not an invitation.
