An act of retrieval, a complete unraveling Painting

Lucy Nordlinger's narrative paintings juxtapose myriad methods of image-making, from naïve sketches to trompe l’oeil—as different ways of being, planes of existence, only capable of coexisting in this particular picture plane. The objects and imagery in the paintings emerge through various wormholes: mythology, anecdotes from history, geological phenomena, rules of survival on the open seas, poems about comets, etc. As they converge together on the picture plane, these objects inherit multiple meanings depending on arrangement, context, and associations. Each object gives clues to another’s meaning and simultaneously confounds its own resolution. A narrative emerges, new yet laden in the history of everything it brings with it.