"What interests me are themes of the sort of fragmentation that happens of yourself when you are in your body and really at a disadvantage in the way of knowing yourself because you know all [your] contradictions, all the ways you exceed or don't quite fit into these certain categories of identity that we're placed in."
Entrancing in vivid color and visceral form, Cut to Ribbons from 2019 is a stunning example of Christina Quarles' unparalleled exploration of figurative abstraction. Fragmented and intertwined, the corporeal figures in Cut to Ribbons navigate between virtual and physical realms, denying rigid classifications of gender, race, and sexuality and imparting profound insight into the complexities of inhabiting a human body in the twenty-first century. Cut to Ribbons was notably executed for the exhibition Christina Quarles: In Likeness at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2019-2020, the first solo exhibition by the artist in a European museum. The present work reflects the profound influence that David Hockney's early paintings have had on artist, a selection of which were on view in the adjoining gallery at The Hepworth Wakefield during her exhibition. Indeed, Quarles' illustration of water in the lower register, use of unprimed canvas, and abrupt shift of perspectives draw directly from Hockney's iconic 1960s swimming pool paintings. As in the best of her paintings, the present work exemplifies Quarles’ experimental and expressive brushwork, which captures both a sense of motion and the beauty of ambiguity. Quarles's gestural lines and technique allow the painting's forms to flow, contort, and evolve with the viewer. Alluringly depicting a disorganized body in a state of excess,Cut to Ribbons confronts the viewer with a disjunct experience of human embodiment, revealing the triumphant apogee of Quarles’ painterly dexterity and innovation.
In Cut to Ribbons, brilliant hues give shape to two entwined figures contoured by sharp markings and washy, diaphanous brushstrokes. The two figures twist together and overlap across the expanse of the canvas, unraveling into intersecting layers of harlequin checkerboard patterns in yellows, and greens, and pinks. Gestural lines allow the forms to flow, contort, and evolve with the viewer. The bodies are simultaneously weighty and buoyant, bobbing against the serene picture planes while simultaneously stretched and pulled by the downward momentum of attenuated limbs. Entangled feet rest on a bar of brilliant azure and appendages cascade downwards to the bottom of the canvas.
In line with the most consummate examples of the artist’s abstract figuration, Cut to Ribbons stratifies the material terrain of the canvas into digitally drafted planes of patterned wallpaper and soft brush strokes which are then displaced by bodily contours. The tripartite division of the canvas blurs the line between medium and picture plane, echoing the floating registers of Mark Rothko's meditative Color Field paintings, while the patterned swirls of blue and white at the bottom of the canvas superbly evoke David Hockeney’s luscious swimming pools, whose expressive use of color and form was a profound influence on Quarles as a child growing up in Los Angeles. The resulting intersection of high-key color, texture, and form in Cut to Ribbons deftly hybridizes physical and digital space, providing a compelling arena for the anonymous figures who are abstracted to almost bare parts to expose the nuances of bodies.
Market Context: Christina Quarles
Quarles, who identifies as a bi-racial and queer cisgender woman, challenges the viewer to contend with the disorganized body in a state of excess. By fragmenting, convulsing, and stretching her subjects, they reach the brink of dissolving into entirely abstract forms. Simultaneously connected and torn, limp yet writhing with tension, the figures in Cut to Ribbons serve as a powerful visual parallel to the experience of inner questioning and turmoil. “We know ourselves as this fragmented jumble of limbs and this kind of code switching that happens throughout our lives and throughout our days,” explains Quarles. “The basis of the work is trying to get at what it is to be in a racialized body, to be in a gendered body, to be in a queer body, really to be in any body and the confusing place that that actually is with knowing yourself.” (Christina Quarles quoted in: Claire Selvin "Christina Quarles on the Intricacies of Figuration and Selfhood" ARTNews, 15 April 2021 (online))
Experimental and expressive brushwork radically fragments corporeal form, expressing the inner complexities of identity and countering fixed identifications of race, gender, and sexuality. “I often say that my paintings are portraits of living within a body, rather than portraits of looking onto a body” says the artist. (Christina Quarles in conversation with David Getsy, in Exh. Cat. The Hepworth Wakefield, Christina Quarles: In Likeness, 2019) “What interests me are themes of the sort of fragmentation that happens of yourself when you are in your body and really at a disadvantage in the way of knowing yourself because you know all [your] contradictions, all the ways you exceed or don't quite fit into these certain categories of identity that we're placed in." (Christina Quarles quoted in: Claire Selvin "Christina Quarles on the Intricacies of Figuration and Selfhood" ARTNews, 15 April 2021 (online)) Cut to Ribbons alluringly explores the dichotomies of the self to illuminate the intersection of gender, sexuality and race while underscoring the diversity and complexity of the universal experience.
