Roxy Walsh at Annika Sundvik - New York, New York - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Roxy Walsh is a painter from Northern Ireland who, after years in Manchester, relocated to London not drawn out ago. In this recent display she offered a witty, slightly defiant, slightly salacious installation of watercolors painted directly onto the small gallery's freshly plastered walls. The artist's vocabulary is not without its erotic irony -- there were destinys of flaccid phalluses, for example. notwithstanding the show, titled "well pussy," did not thus much treat particular issues as display an attitude. And for all its bad-girl posturing, it was primarily about the pleasures of language and painting.

Walsh was able to prompt complex spatial relations among the installation's ultimate parts without resorting to large, defining action s Viewers read the show a great deal of as they might an illuminated manuscript. a certain quantity of of the images were placed with equal reason far from comfortable sight lines -- nearest to pipes near the top of the walls, for example -- that they were easily passed above This was a show requiring shut attention.

A large r tongue dominated the far extreme point of one wall, with alphabetic characters and small constellations of visual debris preceding it. The center wall was taken above by the word "so." The middle of the "o" was filled with exquisite doodles: teardrops, twine, several examples of the alphabetic character "s," the words "kiss" and "sprinkle," an place upright phallus or two, a seated virid body form with a bright-red limp penis falling from where its head should be. The juxtaposition of large and small uncompounded bodys gave the viewer a faculty of perception that Walsh was attempting to use a personal iconography for public purposes

Walsh's humor is linked to a literary sensibility. Her paintings repeatedly incorporate words or phrases, which she works to formal advantage and uses as a way of expressing ideas. In that "o" Walsh included the question, "So really can you number me" and the assertion, "Oh all this talking is with equal reason difficult" -- phrases denoting an interest in verbal, as oppos to visual, communication. Words order her frequently disjunctive images, contextualizing them and suggesting general themes. The change back and forth between pictures and words made the installation have feeling intimate and booklike in scale and expression.

In the gallery's tiny back compass a series of small paintings upon plaster rectangles showed Walsh working more conventionally. A portrait of sum of two units women, seemingly sisters, is particularly moving. In their diminutive size and lyricism, these works perceive like short poems; when the artist isn't being rebellious, she have the appearances filled with a musical sorrow Her stylized provocations are a way of keeping the poetic alive.

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