Cover, November 1987
Culture and Nature
A Zen-like silence permeates the painted spaces of Applebroog’s active and evolving psychological “prisms of time”. From the incessant rumblings of dilemmas and burdens Applebroog’s quiet language dissects the membrane of our human predicament.
Scavenging the hype and boredom of everyday events, Ida finds inspiration from the world around her. She says, “Media is a constant source.”
The paint entitled, “Church of St. Francis Xavier” started with a specific media event, Applebroog explains. “St. Francis was the only Catholic Church in New York City which allowed gays to hold services. When the aids epidemic hit the press, the church closed its doors to them.”
Although the conception for a work may start with a specific media event, the results are always universal. Says the artist, “Ultimately the painting stands for itself—whatever I have in my head when I’m painting is another separate reality. Chernobyl was my working title for the painting “Noble Fields” but whether that specific tragedy comes across to the viewer is not the point—what you see is what you get.”
In these “theatres of memory” the artist sets up a free play of signifiers to engender multiple allegorical and anagogical meanings. The fragmentation of the canvas structure into numerous sizes and shapes further develop the fragmentation of memory into a sort of filmic montage. By juxtaposing images, somewhat in the manner of Surrealists, she works new meaning into the plethora of imagery.
As Ronald Feldman, her long-time dealer puts it, “She set the stage and we are the players.” Like the classical Hermetic systems of memory, her work functions like a mnemonic device, intended to assist the memory by utilizing the laws of association through similarity, dissimilarity and contiguity. One image, in a reign of free association, seems to trigger another, till finally, some vivid recollection takes over.
Light permeates the sculptured silhouettes and fractured apparitions of her painted forms. The limited palette of color is both cerebral and austere. Caramel-colored translucency functions like light through an amber glass, or a hazy sunset, recalling the amber-glowing spaces of Rembrandt, only in a modern pop version. Often times, a heavy knifed application of paint disguised the artist’s hand creating a corrugated low-relief “texture text” of color and form.
An example of this technique can be seen in the painting “Rainbow Caverns.” An elderly woman sits knitting in a rocking chair. At her feet is a pebbled congregation of corm cobs and birds (a heavenly consortium symbolic of freedom from want and desire). Imbued with a low-relief physicality, they function not only as emblems of consumer and consumed, but formal devices to elevate (physically and spiritually) the sense of weight and gravity evidenced in the elderly woman’s pose.
Flattened outlined forms are juxtaposed to brushy expressive areas, creating a collage of art historical styles and likewise concerns. A post-Modernist detachment in the minimal linear figures is coupled with a more expressive use of loose, washy brushed and paletted knifed images—all in all it’s a masterful alchemy of expressive and reductive tendencies.
PEGGY CYPHERS
