rEviEws nogah engLeR
Nogah ENglEr:
ENdlEss Night aNd day
RitteR/Zamet, London
4 octobeR – 17 novembeR
Given that there are an infinite number of subjects that contemporary Engler’s vision is clearly more about the anxiety of dissolution and
painters might address, the extent to which landscape has made a return in distance than a reconciled space of fantasy and escape. That there should
today’s output is striking. And it’s not some sort of old-fashioned academic be a backstory rooted in violence makes sense of these paintings but
traditionalism staging a comeback – it’s often made by a young generation doesn’t fully explain them: Engler’s paintings follow from a journey to the
of artists well grounded in the contemporary moment. It almost seems as if Ukraine, to discover the place where her father and grandfather spent two
the landscape genre allows the perfect painterly escape from the difficulties years in hiding during the Nazi occupation. The openness of any landscape
of the modern world – a sort of old-before-your-time withdrawal into the and the meaning of wilderness are transformed by Engler into something
aesthetic comforts of romantic vistas. hostile and barren, and whether this communicates any sense of specific
But despite the prevalence of landscape on the scene today, terror may not be important. Engler’s collagistic approach, in which no one
there are some painters ready to raise the stakes higher still. Israeli-born element is secure, and in which history and memory become confused with
Nogah Engler’s fragmenting, kaleidoscopic painted visions of a world exposure and disappearance, creates poetic links in which historic tragedy
uncertainly placed between human society and nature, between idyll drives a contemporary reflection on the pictorial conventions of landscape,
and an atmosphere of violence, are particularly acute examples of how without reducing one to the other.
the landscape genre can exploit its own traditions and clash them with In the bright, icy crystalline scenes of the other paintings, there is
our expectations. At first glance Engler’s paintings present a bucolic if even less refuge. In The Passage, an animal – either wolf or sheep – lies
disjointed woodland wilderness. In Dusk (all works 2007), a darkening scene dead at the base of a canvas whose broken painting tentatively assembles
of wasted woods and brownish marshes spreads out under a bleak sky. A a mountainous horizon concealing some partial elements of human
foreground of wild berries and vegetation provides little comfort to a herd architecture, partly blocked off by fragments of wire fencing. In the most
of deer, which are colourless and ghostly. Engler’s approach is deliberately extreme dismantling of pictorial coherence, Way Under projects a prismatic
inconsistent; these normally reassuring figures – botanical and zoological scene of dazzling light, in which vegetation hides in dark cavities, seemingly
mainstays of classical landscape painting – are here merely cut-and-pasted recoiling from the bunkerlike truncated pyramid at the centre. If Engler’s
fragments, contributing to the painting’s overall sense of breakdown and world is one in which the natural and the human cohabit in ambiguous
incoherence. On the horizon, vague chimneystacks spew smoke into the tension, it is perhaps because they obscurely recall a moment when humans
darkness, replacing the visual rhythm of the stunted trees. found themselves turned to animals, turned into prey. J.J. Charlesworth
Way Under, 2007, oil and gloss
paint on canvas, 170 x 190 cm.
courtesy Ritter/Zamet, London
129 artrEviEw
December_REVIEWS.indd 129 2/11/07 12:15:38
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