Paintings by Visual Arts Alumna Kelsey Shwetz ’22 in Solo Show at Half Gallery
Visual Arts alumna Kelsey Shwetz ’22 creates paintings that are hyper realistic and full of tenderness, which is entirely fitting for A Lamp is Not the Only Sign of Glass, her current solo show with Half Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. That title, drawn from poet Gertrude Stein’s book, Tender Buttons, intentionally draws attention to Shwetz’s approach to setting an image on a canvas: draw everything in variegated shades of light.
“The exhibition premise is simple,” the gallery’s press release notes, “what if light itself was the main character in our story?” The release goes on to point out that in Shwetz’s paintings, “raking light, divine light, natural light, artificial light, [and] even shadows all have their cameos.”
The Light Fell on Her Face in a Gentle Network of Shadow (14’ x 11,’ oil on canvas, 2023) is an excellent example of how Shwetz sees and paints. In the painting, a figure’s shadow is feathered and slanted in the bottom right hand corner of a wooded landscape; the light the figure stands within is bright, viscerally golden, and constrained to the right side of the canvas; the light sweeps upward and then swings gently towards the left, where a warm orb of light pulses, and above it, at a slight angle, a dusty blue patch of sky emerges. The effect is striking and what becomes apparent—besides Shwetz’s deft paint strokes and use of perspective—is how one’s gaze has been tenderly guided and controlled. The viewer’s eye sees what the shadowed figure sees, making for a viewing experience that is closest to accompaniment—and all this through pigmentation, a subtle tilt in the frame, and very fine strokes of shadows.
In a recent interview with BOMB Magazine, Shwetz explains, “there are rarely figures in my work. I find it interesting to imbue plant and geological life with the same agency and personality as the figure.” In The Light Fell on Her Face in a Gentle Network of Shadow, that, too, becomes apparent. The figure is not entirely a figure, but a shadow of a figure. Fittingly, as one views this painting, the shadowed figure very quickly dissolves and gives way visually to the vegetation they’ve encountered.
“I imagine a plant turning the face of its leaves to observe you, or rock spaces intentionally blocking your view or opening up to allow you to pass through,” Shwetz says in that BOMB interview—and this, too, is what happens in The Light Fell. Shwetz’s intention in executing landscapes on a canvas in this way is to “replicate the ways consciousness operates,” and to make possible a multi-directional experience of seeing.
Kelsey Shwetz is a Canadian born painter who lives in New York. She is a two-time recipient of the The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, along with grants from Canada Council for the Arts and the Mayer Foundation. She was awarded fellowships by the Vermont Studio Center, The Choy Family, Ellen Gelmen, Columbia University and CanSerrat Residency in Barcelona.