Janaki Lennie

HOLLY JOHNSON GALLERY
1411 Dragon Street
December 1–December 30

Houston artist Janaki Lennie’s latest exhibition of suburban landscapes proves an engrossing portrayal of the sometimes copasetic, sometimes strained relationship between nature and human industry. Lennie paints fragments of trees and buildings, pushing both subjects to the edges of the canvas. The center is occupied by large expanses of subtly gradated sky. Yet this is no ordinary vista of pale blue and puffy clouds. Instead it is blank and appears artificially lit. The unusually detailed renderings of dull browns and dirty greens make the atmosphere feel thick and ominous, as if the air were dangerously toxic. Ironically, the title of the show is “Breathing Space,” a reference to the diminishing area between two worlds perpetually encroaching upon each other. The paintings in the exhibition with the greatest impact, however, are not the images where nature merely abuts factory structures or oil refineries, but rather those in which the interaction is muddled. In several canvases, dappled tree limbs appear entangled with the soaring metal of radio towers or tall street lamps, mutating each distinct entity into some living hybrid. These odd moments inject a hint of science fiction into Lennie’s art (imagine the lamps as apocryphal UFOs). Ultimately, the tension between familiarity and fiction is what gives these paintings their lasting impression—a meditative quietude sharpened with foreboding uncertainty.

—Matthew Bourbon

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 Janaki Lennie at Sala Diaz

 In recent paintings by Houston-based Janaki Lennie, the urban landscape is filtered through the antediluvian lens of the sublime, which produces images that are disquieting but by no means entirely dystopian. Lennie constructs a hybrid realm—one neither wholly natural nor artificial—and positions the viewer as both potentially omnipotent and, in a way, impotent. These works are not about revelation but acceptance, and the artist does make a strong visual case for the latter.

In his seminal work A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, (1757), Edmund Burke represented human encounters with the sublime as potentially terrifying experiences. Painters, specifically those who employ landscape, have long explored the rift between human beings and the natural world. Such references are evident in Lennie’s two small suites of work currently on view at Sala Diaz. A hyper-realistic magic hour palette, however, lends her landscapes a decidedly contemporary and cinematic feel, as if we are viewing the architectonic bone structures of the urban world for the first time. This phenomenon is heightened by a careful skew in perspective, which adds to an overall hallucinatory effect: we are privy to neither the foreground nor the horizon line. Wide fields of slightly acerbic hues—muted, off-key greens, beiges and mauves—dominate each small canvas. Compositional elements—power lines, street lamps and tree branches—hug the edge of each painting. Without positional reference, the overall effect is a liminal perspective, much like staring at the sky while lying on the bed of a truck plowing through the smog-filled streets of Houston at dusk.

A second series of paintings depicts small groups of anonymous human figures traipsing (rather than floating) upon barren fields of snowy white. Here the artist plays just as much with scale as perspective. The figures are minute, isolated in a small portion of the frame yet each outstretched limb is discernible, as is their deliberate formation. The only clues Lennie lends in terms of perspective are the carefully placed shadows of each figure, which position them temporally rather than geographically, imparting the series with the same unresolved ethos as her landscapes. And while the unresolved positioning of the viewer is somewhat in keeping with traditional notions of the sublime, the celestial seems more than metaphysically distant in Lennie’s work. The works feel illusory yet synthetic. In the landscapes, the sun itself is shrouded in otherworldly colors, its light diffused by anodized haze. This suggests that the artist is not merely rearticulating the art historical past: rather, she is hinting at a mediated present—one in which beauty can be found in the least likely of places regardless of circumstance.

Anjali Gupta, Editor of Artlies.

 

 

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Essay from the catalogue for “Perspectives 52 – 4 Artists 4 Stories”  Contemporary Arts Museum Houston

June 2006

By Paola Morsiani, curator

Janaki Lennie’s work is inspired by nature and by the Western landscape painting tradition.  Her most recent oil paintings are derived from the distinguishing features of the Houston cityscape: its tropically luscious, radiantly green trees, and the architectural motifs of the energy industry that drives its economy.  Collectively titled Breathing Space, each painting is numbered progressively and is a subtle variation in color and composition on those completed before it.

In the Western tradition, landscape paintings are typically oriented horizontally to suggest limitless distance.  Although Lennie also focuses far and high, at the midpoint between the horizon line and the zenith, she contains this open sky within the vertical edges of the canvas, whose periphery she crowds with indeterminate landmarks such as factories and fragments of vegetation.

 Lennie’s painting process begins analytically, with the elements of landscape rather than with an existing image of nature.  She works in layers, first rendering the sky as a solid monochromatic plane, and then developing more earthbound details in slightly thicker brushstrokes. As she moves from painting to painting, she stretches her palette of brown and gray tones to its subtlest reaches, creating skies that are deep, dense yet opaque, and inhospitable: the only hint of a human presence is the occasional hazy sparkle of an electric light. Because its emptiness so dominates the picture plane, Lennie’s sky is neither an illusionistic nor a symbolic space, but an experiential one, much closer to us than we initially may think. 

 The other compositional components in Lennie’s paintings—the stylized foliage and industrial architecture—read as signs, as fragments of an obsolete technology rather than as symbols of progress. By emphasizing the tonal relationships between colors, Lennie is able to use these elements to adjust the depth of the monochromatic center.  As reflectors of the most unnatural shades of light, they bring to mind the still skies over the dehumanizing landscape in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1965), a chilling meditation on the psychological effects of late capitalism.

 In contrast to many contemporary artists, who look to nature largely as a source of ornamental solutions, Lennie considers nature a reality, as “the best reference.” Her painting can be compared to that of the American artist Brice Marden, for whom “the edge [is] the balancing point.”*  The sky at the center of Lennie’s work is a precise point in space, where earthly humors—both natural and human-made—condense.  In treating technology as nature and nature as experience, Lennie takes landscape back to a true sense of place.

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Janaki Lennie: Breathing Space
Rudolph Projects/Artscan Gallery March 10- April 29, 2006
by Christopher French

Representation is a process of enumeration, a series of descriptions of people and things that seeks to establish a coherent narrative or a sense of place. The centeredness or compositional unity provided by perspective is at the heart of this tradition, and it is this centeredness that Janaki Lennie inverts in her exhibition Breathing Space. Her vertically oriented, 5-by-4 proportioned panels fairly shout 'window'; however, they offer all the particular components but none of the structured legibility that we expect when looking at a landscape. Centrifuging the pertinent details of place to the edges, where they cling and accumulate into dense bundles, Lennie offers suggestive portraits of the contemporary sensibility known as ex-urban.

Upending our expectations for detailed depiction supported by generalized background, Lennie's primary subject is always the distant sky, which she does not record in seasonal variation, but at its most unnatural: as the steely ozone alert sky of a summer afternoon; the leaden artifice of a city night-sky, or the bruised purple-brown of thunderstorm anticipation.   There are no horizon lines in Breathing Space to intimate distance or specify locale, so that the details of each painting, described largely in tonal variants of the sky's predominant monochrome, read like grisaille stage props in a theatrical production, anchoring our attention on the otherwise overwhelming nowhereness that is at the heart of each painting.

Sometimes Lennie divides different kinds of detail on different sides of a painting, composing like a classifying scientist assaying a sample. The tree branches bordering lower or center left in Breathing Space 206 and 115 are counterbalanced at extreme right by compressed packets of strong verticals composed of light towers, telephone poles, and silhouetted building profiles. In other paintings Lennie piles all of her details to one side, instilling her scenes with the tension of a tenuous truce about to be broken. Severely cropped, tubular, and totally industrial, the forms lurking on the right edge of Breathing Space 114 conjure both fantasy (the externals of a spaceship), and utility (the piping of an oilrig). Breathing Space 113 , which piles both natural and mechanical forms into an amalgam that runs top to bottom on the panel's right side, is more naturalistic, enforcing an ant's perspective, with tree branches succeeded by light poles, which are in turn surmounted by the geometry of a broadcast tower. At her most abstract ( Breathing Space 210 and 58 ), Lennie dispenses almost entirely with architectural detail, placing a solitary parallelogram on the upper left side of her composition to balance the tree forms that clump in the lower right.

If the atmospheric grounds of these paintings are relentlessly abstract in their monochrome intensity, the flotsam that props them up is detailed with exquisite neutrality. Lennie's leaves and tree limbs are not observed from nature—they are archetypes of trees, repeatable integers that are made with tightly scripted gestures, like the formulaic strokes of classic Chinese ink painting. Lennie is a careful editor, removing identifying signage or other particulars of place so that her manmade imagery becomes interchangeable and capable of sustaining any number of readings.

On her website Lennie talks about how 'glimpses of the sky seen between the intrusions of the city' can 'offer a path to reconnect with mythic notions of earth and stars.' This romantic ideal is conveyed by paintings that are frankly beautiful in their execution but in conception are full of existential angst about the inhuman qualities of life in an 'edge city' environment. Just as there is no grounding horizontal in any of these paintings to indicate a 'here,' no people muddy the polarities that dominate this series. Equal parts enervating and exhilarating, the spaces Lennie constructs in Breathing Space square the circle between naturalism and abstraction, intimating the possibility of a place where the timelessness of art and the daily artifices of contemporary life can cohabit.

Christopher French is an artist and writer living in Houston.

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Janaki Lenni and Mona Marshall
Line of Sight

Women and Their Work

Rebecca S. Cohen

You know it’s true. No matter how well-intentioned the friend who sets you up, blind dates are usually a recipe for disaster. Best case scenario, you waste an evening that would’ve been better spent at home with a good book. Recently, however, the folks at Women & Their Work proved that when it comes to pairing artists who are strangers, a successful marriage of the minds can in fact result. The gallery’s exhibition of works by Janaki Lennie, currently of Houston (and formerly the Reviews Editor for this publication), and Austin’s Mona Marshall suggests that these artists have been talking to each other about issues of place, space and the human condition for a very long time. In actuality, the two have only recently been introduced. While the works are installed as independent yet simultaneous exhibits, a whispered dialogue permeates the galleries.

Janaki Lennie, Future Conditional 42203, 2003
Graphite on paper
30 x 22 inches

To my surprise, W&TW presented Lennie’s spare graphite on paper and graphite on gesso board drawings. I was expecting her signature paintings on canvas—lovely pastel-hued skyscapes that graze the tops of buildings and trees and reveal the hazy atmosphere beyond. Instead, the walls were filled with black and white works of varying scale, each with only a few human figures or small, iconic trees set against vast, satiny-white backdrops. Lennie’s figures appear neither stranded in snowy fields nor lost in a desert landscape. They stride with determination or stand firmly in place with equal resolve. They are miniscule within the picture plane—a fraction of an inch high in some cases. And yet, there are unmistakable details—the swing of an individual arm or leg indicating that these figures are not necessarily marching lockstep or even headed in the same direction. These are definitely independent men on the move or, in some cases, standing pensive and still. The viewer suspends disbelief and enters their strangely barren world, either filling in the blanks or accepting the vast void of the environment and its implications. Sometimes opposing groups of figures are divided by a simple line, an elegant metaphor perhaps, or merely a minimalist tool to organize space. In the compositions where similarly positioned trees are substituted for human figures, the absence of urban clutter is intensified. (If one of those trees fell, would there be any noise?)

Mona Marshall’s black and white, architectonic encaustic paintings on prepared paper consist of white, gray and black brush strokes that thickly coat the entire picture plane with nervous lines scratched into the surface. The first impression of an intersection between Lennie and Marshall’s bodies of work is one of a typically ill-matched blind date: willowy ascetic meets zaftig, gum-chewing spitfire. But wait—there are commonalities. Marshall creates urban environments as apt to intimidate and swallow us up as the vast stretches of white in Lennie’s landscapes. Marshall’s large, textured drawings are as chaotic at first glance as Lennie’s are serene. But, when one settles into them it becomes clear that this artist, too, is presenting isolated figures set within vast—albeit more detailed—dreamscapes. Marshall invites the viewer to project his or her own narrative against the thrusting walls and surfaces. I imagine the aftermath of an earthquake, a postapocalyptic view of city life, grim and unsettling in the manner of South African artist William Kentridge. Marshall’s technique suggests the same jittery movement as Kentridge’s videos, and her figures seem caught in a similarly dour story line.

The figures in Marshall’s works are the city cousins to Lennie’s wide-open country kin. Or, perhaps, Marshall’s pictures represent uniquely American clutter in contrast to Lennie’s more austere Australian aesthetic (the artist has been a resident of the USA only since 1994). In any event, Marshall places us closer to the figure than Lennie. Her subjects are no longer striding across the landscape but are very still, waiting and contemplating their next move. She offers more visual information to draw on—we are aware of costume and gender. We stand closer but still navigate on instinct, trying to make sense of the topsy-turvy experience she offers. Marshall’s works are all titled Point of Entry, with no confirmation of where the journey leads. Lennie titles her work Future Conditional, and we travel across vaguely unfamiliar territory with a feeling of apprehension about our destination. What is certain is that we have been eavesdropping on a conversation between two strangers who have found a great deal to talk about on their first “date.” Good for them! Good for us.

 

Houston Press     8-2-2001 Artificial Light Janaki Lennie sees no stars, only strange transcendent beauty in her cityscapes By John Devine   Houston can be a place of strange contrasts for us transplants. The odd urban-residential texture fostered by a lack of zoning; the mile upon mile of shopping centers, all looking the same despite their pathetic attempts to distinguish themselves from one another; the ribbons of highways that tie this sprawl together with intricate bows of overpasses and interchanges: All of this can present certain challenges to aesthetic sensibilities nurtured elsewhere. Then there are the natural elements of the Gulf Coast landscape -- the extreme flatness of the terrain; the enormous sky; the humid light that softens the horizon; the unearthly glow that accompanies the more impressive thunderstorms. And of course the sunsets, those brilliant explosions that everyone blames on pollution, as if the sun must have set with less display before the proliferation of the internal combustion engine. Houston can offer such a confounding combination of the sublime and the ridiculous that it's a miracle the place doesn't collapse under the weight of its contradictions. But what may drive some of us to distraction can be a source of inspiration to others. Janaki Lennie, an Australian artist who landed in Houston six years ago, has been captivated by this brave new world. Her first appearance, several years ago in a group exhibit, trumpeted the impact that her new surroundings had on her: large charcoal drawings of overpasses, seen from ground level, looming over and encircling the viewer -- the Houston urbanscape filtered through Dante. A few years later she produced a series of reinterpretations of well-known Hudson River School paintings, into which she introduced mythically huge freeways, which dominated the famous vistas, imposing a 20th-century version of American manifest destiny on a 19th-century vision of the American sublime. She then took a brief side trip to explore the alone-in-a-crowd theme with a series of predominately white paintings, in which figures seen from an elevated angle stood in loose groups on stark flat grids, like pieces on a game board, with no apparent interaction. Now her solo debut, "Stargazing,"on view at McMurtrey Gallery, effectively consolidates all of Lennie's previous concerns. All of the paintings are titled after stars, but there are no stars in these works. That's part of the point. The paintings all follow the same basic format, with slight variations: A distant, obviously urban horizon forms the lower border of the composition, with the underside of a foregrounded roadway framing the top. In between is twilight sky, nothing but sky, filling the composition with a luminous, monochromatic field. Lennie works with a variety of colors from canvas to canvas, and gradations of color within specific paintings. In all of these works, the viewer is oriented toward the west, the urban horizons silhouetted by the dying light of day, so that the paintings darken as your eye travels upward until it arrives at the highway and discovers a weird light, from another source, shining on the concrete abutments. In a moment, you realize this light must be coming from the street lamps illuminating the roadway above your head. This light at the top echoes the light at the bottom, but unnaturally. And you realize why there are no stars -- as the skies get darker, the urban light takes over, illuminating locally while obscuring generally. It doesn't take long for you to notice something else a bit unsettling about these paintings: Lennie positions you in her composition so that your perspective doesn't quite make sense. You're too high and too low at the same time -- in fact, you're suspended in midair. You're betwixt and between, which means you don't know where you are. Nor can you be quite sure what your relationship is to that far-off horizon, or what you might want it to be. Don't go looking for these freeways and streetlights and microwave towers and stadium lights. You won't find that particular curve of overpass ramp. These are generic urban horizons, not specific locations, and Lennie emphasizes that lack of specificity with odd arrangements. In Epsilon Aquarius (2001), for example, the horizon is cluttered with billboards, two of them at such an angle to each other that their messages would be so garbled together as to be incoherent. Beta Andromeda (2000) offers a soft gray twilight with greenish tones that is quite peaceful and soothing -- so, of course, it has the busiest horizon, a frenetic jumble of electrical towers, road signs and highway lamps at a density not even Houston would tolerate. But you're drawn to these horizons despite your disquiet; you're drawn to the light as well as the space, pressed in as you are by the roadway above your head. So you take refuge in the skies that stretch above an urban wilderness, a man-made wilderness thrown up against a natural world that is impacted, but not intimidated, by human activity. You go looking for the stars with the mythical names. In these paintings, Lennie has given us a vision of transcendent beauty set against dystopia. While she hasn't reconciled the two (who could?), she does bring them into an uneasy balance, a balance that should be familiar to Houstonians who complain about the traffic and the smog and the sprawl, but apparently wouldn't have it any other way. In one painting, however, Lennie tips the balance a bit more toward the sublime. Alpha Aquarius (2001) slightly deviates from the structure of the other paintings -- the lower border is formed by shadowy treetops rather than a horizon, while the top border is just the slightest hint of a roadway shaving the upper right corner. The sky fills in the rest, a lighter, brighter expanse of blue. Within the asymmetrical frame, the sky takes the shape of a planet as seen close by from one of its moons. It's a vision of a new world, one we can almost touch.