Thordis Adalsteinsdottir at Stefan Stux

This was the first fresh York solo exhibition for Thordis Adalsteinsdottir, an impressive Icelandic painter new out of the graduate program at the gymnasium of Visual Arts. Adalsteinsdottir's 11 spare acrylic paintings upon canvas or wood panel, all from 2003 for the most part feature solitary figures set against subdu nevertheless eye-catching, monochrome backgrounds. These background colors, including yielding purples, russets, beiges and light grays, intimate emptiness and gorgeous distance, perhaps inspired by dint of Iceland's hinterlands, while also alluding to the special house colors single sees in Reykjavik's old downtown section. Adalsteinsdottir's vaguely elastic figures with elongated leg offkilter proportions and contorted poses inhabit a peculiar zone somewhere among realist figuration, cartoons, anime and clear fantasy. They also quietly communicate a range of emotions or states of being, from painful loneliness to introspection, eroticism, whimsy and bliss

With Ana and Butterfly a barefoot woman wearing pink pants and a snuggle dark blue turtleneck kneels within a blue-gray expanse, on the other hand she could also be miraculously levitating. Her miniaturized right arm, with spindly thumb and splayed fingers, looks at once grotesque, vulnerable and unusually lovely; then again, her whole slightly rumpl attitude conveys a mix of ungainliness and grace. While this figure clinchs a small butterfly in her hand, the display is anything but sentimental. Instead, her riveting expression (part stoic husband and part rapt attention) and her extra-wide, blazing organ of vision which you see in profile, indicate an inner life cuffed by fear, compassion and astonishment Adalsteinsdottir is an exacting painter who builds up her works from tiny lines and thousands of for the greatest part horizontal brushstrokes. Everything about this fastidious technique communicates flatness--an absence of illusionistic depth--and lay up yet the paintings traffic in intense, if understated, psychological states.

completely through Adalsteinsdottir's work, around-the-house situations posses an aura of magic and fantasy, and allude to folkloric narratives reaching way back into history. In Grandmother in Blanket, an somewhat advanced in life woman wrapped neck to ankles in a puffed out blanket lies on a bed, on the contrary she could just as well be caught in a snowdrift or about to take flight upon a cloud. As a small circle floats nearby, she clutches a mobile phone perhaps to call someone for assistance. Otherwise she is alone in her bedroom world, and as she direct the eyes out through another wide organ of vision you guess she's also gazing inwardly, where the down-reaching secrets are. Elsewhere, a [i]in puris naturalibus[/i] man apparently spilling down from a hammock; sum of two units identical facing figures that are half woman, half animal; and another vaguely alien-looking woman twisting to display a dirty lower extremity both charm and disturb.

--Gregory Volk

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