Eleanor Swordy
at Moskowitz Bayse

Eleanor Swordy, This Is Now (2018). Oil on canvas, 65 x 79 inches. Courtesy the artist and Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles.

The blond woman in Eleanor Swordy’s painting For You (all works 2018) has marks all over her arms, cheeks, and the table in front of her: samples of lipsticks, eye shadows, and eye liners. Yet none of this makeup could have made her eye look the way it does, like a three-dimensional, half-purple, half-flesh colored ping-pong ball floating above her socket. Better still, in her reflection in the mirror facing her, the eye is just a line drawing—from sci-fi elaborateness to rudimentary. Plays like this make Swordy’s paintings sumptuous and reward close, in-person looking.

In Swordy’s second show at Moskowitz Bayse, Is This Real, each large scale painting seems a story onto itself. In That Was Then, two child-like figures—their bodies more cherubic and young looking than their poses—muse. The girl sits at a round, glowing orange table speckled with half-consumed food and drink, her head on her hands, looking down at the boy lying beneath her. He’s gazing into the mosaic he appears to be building, of a town, mountains, and sunset. In On The Steps, an overall-wearing artist sculpts multiple statues at once.

In an era in which self-consciously quoting modernists is ubiquitous (so many homages to Gris, Mondrian, etc., often pleas for validation), Swordy quotes only to serve her own purposes—her fluency in art history is not equivalent to reverence. The obvious, iconic reference, Picasso, comes out in her characters’ rounded limbs, but she uses this early history of abstraction like a tool for making figuration more allegorical than literal. Dana Schutz, who also idiosyncratically stylizes her subjects in an immediately recognizable manner, comes to mind as a contemporary forerunner. In comparing Schutz and Swordy, it becomes clear, however, that Swordy belongs on the opposite side of the digital divide. Unlike so many so-called “internet artists,” she isn’t commenting on flatness or the confines of a screen, but the work is of its era, made by someone who surrounded by the language of Photoshop whether she sought it out or not. The one drawback to the work is that from a distance, you could imagine the colorful images constructed on screen, making the paintings look falsely familiar, like digital frames we’ve seen before. This prompts us to think we know a painting before we’ve really looked, and thus miss the weird experiments in shape, texture, and dimension that make the work so satisfying.  

Eleanor Swordy: Is This Real runs from September 8–October 27, 2018 at Moskowitz Bayse (743 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90038).

Eleanor Swordy, Is This Real? (2018) (installation view).Courtesy the artist and Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles.

Eleanor Swordy, The Expulsion (2018). Oil on canvas, 63 x 77 inches. Courtesy the artist and Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles.

Eleanor Swordy, That Was Then (2018). Oil on canvas, 54 x 60 inches. Courtesy the artist and Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles.

Eleanor Swordy, Is This Real? (2018) (installation view).Courtesy the artist and Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles.

Eleanor Swordy, Here It Is (2018). Oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches. Courtesy the artist and Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles.

Eleanor Swordy, Hold Still (2018). Oil on canvas, 54 x 54 inches. Courtesy the artist and Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles.

Eleanor Swordy, On The Steps (2018). Oil on canvas, 68 x 84 inches. Courtesy the artist and Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles.

Catherine Wagley writes about art and visual culture in Los Angeles.

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