There is a certain feeling of catharsis present in the works of Ilana Savdie. As I walked into her show, Radical Contractions, at the Whitney Museum of Art, and the ten-foot paintings towered colossally over me, it felt like my only option was to surrender to their fluorescent pools. Acidic gradients spilled and bled around collapsed sacks and bodies. Unruly swirls and irregular textures swam through the composition like alien flesh. Vibrant colors lead paths that continuously rerouted and pulled apart. The artist’s paintings are grotesque and uncanny — and that’s what makes them irresistibly seductive.
On a call from her studio in Bushwick, Ilana confesses that failure was the key to her success as an artist. “When I say that I’ve been making art for 15 years, a lot of it was terrible,” she says. Yet it was failure that allowed her to try something new. “I began forcing myself to select a space within that failure and see it through. There’s a carnage to change.” What at first felt wrong to her, ultimately transformed how she saw her work.
As Ilana began experimenting with her practice, she found that paint would spill in the wrong places, mixtures would dry the wrong way, and small pesky cracks would run through the paint’s surface. Upon closer inspection of these imperfections, she realized she was actually drawn to them. This feeling of satisfaction led her to build upon these techniques. Today, her paintings exude both a controlled mastery of formal methods and a practiced development of her own. The material construction of her works feels pristine — it is the composition that is uncanny and disturbing.
“I approach everything as a body,” she says. Elements that read as abstract, figurative, atmospheric, or negative space can instead be read as bodies, alive, breathing, pulsing, and constantly transforming. Her shapes evoke the cartilage and frenulum, which is the tissue that connects the most delicate parts of our flesh to our larger organs. Her work “Pinching the Frenulum” (2023) evokes the irresolvable tension between the flesh and the nerve ending, between the nerve ending and organ.
Ilana wants the bodies in her work “to be grotesque, as the body is grotesque.” Collapsed figures wrap around each other, extending theatrically across the compositions. Ilana has always embraced the theatrical, a sensibility she acquired growing up in Barranquilla, Colombia. “These colors are very instinctive to me. I am pulling from these spaces because these are spaces of resistance and rebellion. I employ the theatrical as modes of resistance, mockery, and exaggeration, they are part of my own resistance and rebellion. And I know that my palette allows me to do that.”
She works from a place of guttural instinct when it comes to color. As she developed her craft, she realized that profound, luminous colors felt more natural to her than the palettes she’d encountered studying art history. “Sometimes you have to stop reading and allow instinct to take over,” she says.
Ilana’s seductively gaudy palettes allow her to lean comfortably into kitsch, to decode the rules of taste and satisfy her own unruly aesthetic desires. Inspired by the environment of her hometowns, Barranquilla and Miami, these colors felt intoxicatingly arousing.
As we look at the paintings, we find that paths are formed, stretched, cut off, or ultimately rerouted. “There is no sense of comfort when looking at this work. Instead, there is a sense of desire and longing without resolution,” she says. That desire runs viscerally throughout Ilana’s body of work. Her signature style rises up from a deep understanding of her own discomfort. “Any tiny ounce of confidence I had in me, I had to challenge that. I had to allow myself to experiment and possibly fail. Whenever you try something new, it’s ugly, and it’s dirty, and it’s raw. But from that, you can make something great if you see it through — until that thing is something real.”
‘Ilana Savdie: Radical Contractions’, curated by Marcela Guerrero and Angelica Arbaelaez, is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through November 5th.
Credits
All images courtesy of the artist