Aili Schmeltz @ Johansson Projects

by David M. Roth

I’m not sure when, exactly, we emerged from the painting-is-dead era, but its denouement over several decades, starting in the 1990s, marked the emergence of new possibilities.  The latest, the employment of once-ignored aspects of craft, has further eroded barriers that have long defined painting as a two-dimensional art form built solely on pigment.

In Light Echoes, her second exhibition at Johansson Projects, Aili Schmeltz, an artist who divides her time between studios in Los Angeles and California’s high desert, reminds us that painting is, at root, a textile-based medium.  She does so by embroidering canvases into which she cuts holes to form “windows” through which painted backgrounds – readable as lakes, ponds, cloud formations, islands or abstract patterns  – can be glimpsed.  The embroidered parts, some of which she renders in dayglo-colored thread, form shimmering ridges that, a different junctures, resemble high-altitude views of terraced farms, ancient glyphs, oceans and forests. 

The effect is roughly akin to what we see in James Turrell’s Skyscapes, except that instead of immersing us in telescoped visions of sky seen through architectural apertures, Schmeltz’s paintings jostle us back and forth between elevated surfaces and views of whatever contents populate the sub-surface portals.  The result is a mildly disorienting visual two-step – something you can only experience in-person since reproductions fail to capture the low-relief character of the artist’s “topography.”  Spatial confusion, achieved by this melding of multiple perspectives, is the show’s most engaging aspect.

Lopez, in which patches of cloud-flecked sky poke through gaps in embroidered tree shapes, is a particularly vivid example.  In this, interlocking lines, rendered in saguaro-green thread, define shapes that bend, twist, and double back on themselves, hinting at Op without actually delivering those effects.  Other works like Untitled 1, Untitled 2 and Didion, done in retina-scorching colors, recall the psychedelic palette of 1960s-era concert posters, the designs of which masked writing that only the cognoscenti could discern.  In these works, electrically charged lines reminiscent of those seen in Aboriginal bark paintings surround floating “islands,” affecting the look of sunlight reflected from ocean depths.

Two ceramic sculptures on view showcase the artist’s interest in architecture.  Composed of modular shapes stacked one atop the other, they resemble scale models of Mayan ruins, their geometric shapes a presence in Schmeltz’s paintings since at least 2018.  She calls them cairns: stone stacks used for wayfinding.  Their appearance here in what would otherwise be a painting show, alerts us to the perceptual links between between light, space and volume, the artist’s longstanding concerns.

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Aili Schmeltz @ “Light Echoes” @ Johansson Projects through May 18, 2024. 

About the author: David M. Roth is the editor, publisher, and founder of Squarecylinder, where, since 2009, he has published over 400 reviews of Bay Area exhibitions.  He was previously a contributor to Artweek and Art Ltd. and senior editor for art and culture at the Sacramento News & Review.