PRESS RELEASE (including for a concurrent show in Boston)

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Jodie Manasevit has exhibited her painting with Mario Diacono and David Dixon in the past. It is worth returning to the writing by these two curators to help frame Manasevit’s current Cathexis.

 

(In 2010) Diacono sets the stage by beginning: With a still deepening sentiment of being in the midst of an historical dead-endness—of having for this very reason to redraw incessantly its own social and formal profile, its resistance in the devolution of culture, Painting seems never to stop devising new languages (or jargons) of representation, or for self-representation. The expanded internalization by artists of the many past, vastly diverse yet congruous stories or histories of Art, and the desire of painters to respond in (new) tone to societal objectives and objects, projects, dreams and traumas, new media, experiences and experimentation—collapse and coalesce uncannily into the shapes that appear on the (new) canvases.

 

(In 2020) Dixon follows with: Manasevit is not naive, nor are her paintings; born in 1951 she has been at this for a very long time, transitioning her approach from a structuralist sensibility around the turn of the last century into her painting’s current unconstrained condition––each day a new break with a rule never fully established. Consequently, she attains not the transcendence of the 20th century’s struggles with abstraction, but a double transcendence of abstraction beyond polemics. Like others in her generation, her work revels in a victory already won, a perpetual anarchic accomplishment of the beyond that can finally refuse to fight.

 

(In 2025) Manasevit offers abstract paintings of sensitive surface and provocative color that, within their modest size, provide focused pools of intensity. Dabs of color float, and sometimes march, across pulsing fields of carefully calibrated affect. Manasevit is a master colorist whose pallet reaches back to decades of combinations and relationships, preferring strong purples, teals, soft pinks and modulated whites. Approaching the meditative quality of monochromes, her paintings remain animated and dazzled by color, sometimes asserting the edge or reframing our compositional attention. It remains important to not only see the paintings, but to be with them, a projected ethos that increasingly seems fraught. Manasevit’s paintings are by no means contentious, quite the opposite, but when found in a historical context that denies attention, they are prepared to assert their might.

 

Considering this amplification, perhaps it is not coincidental that both these exhibitions, and their respective proprietors, refuse a neutral, white-walled gallery. Diacono’s Boston gallery has walls permanently painted in the colors of the four elements related to alchemical symbolism that, for each show, can attract only certain works—like calibrated magnets, the exhibition’s walls and Manasevit’s paintings attract each other. As for Dixon’s approach in NYC, the gallery walls are custom built and plastered in color with the paintings inset into the walls, emphasizing painting’s relevant surface, not its depth, and emulating through consideration the color pallet of Manasevit’s exhibited artworks.

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We are enthused by this rare opportunity to present, for the public’s review in two major North American cities, this seasoned yet still under-recognized painter, Jodie Manasevit, in a double- city presentation.