Martha Ehrlich:
Martha Ehrlich’s series “One Hundred Paintings,” now at Space Gallery, consists of 100 eight-by-eight-inch plaster blocks snaking around the walls. Into each one is set a smaller Masonite board bearing an image–but all the images seem to be the same. A man seen in profile is seated at a nondescript gray table resting his right cheek in his hands. His brow is furrowed, and his right eye is in such deep shadow we can’t tell whether it’s open or closed. A few objects are on the table before him–and this is the one part of the image that changes from panel to panel. In one there are four red balls, in another a toy animal, in another a blank piece of paper.
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Each picture has a different title, and the combination of titles and subjects often argues for seeing beauty in the simplest of things. The first picture–A Brilliant Harmony of Fantasy and Function (the paintings are arranged alphabetically)–shows an empty table, and the title seems to declare its completeness and perfection. At the same time the table is a potential space for fantasy, almost like a cinema screen on which different images are projected. In the second, A Celebration of Design, the table holds an egg resting near a bowl: two simple, curved objects whose shapes echo each other. The third, A Chef’s Palette, offers a tiny pancakelike concoction garnished with what look like red berries (throughout the series Ehrlich compares the “mundane,” traditionally female activity of cooking to painting).
Most intriguing are works whose titles function both seriously and ironically. True Artistic Inspiration–a single piece of crumpled paper–can be seen as a sarcastic comment on art making or as a positive reference to 20th-century art history: thrown-away paper and other detritus make up now-classic collages. Objects of Rare Beauty and Fantasy at first seems clearly ironic: it shows three pieces of blank paper laid atop each other. But if one thinks of Robert Rauschenberg’s white paintings or of the many other great works that are mostly blank, encouraging the viewer to find beauty in simple white, the cliched title can be taken literally.
If there’s a unifying principle to “One Hundred Paintings,” it lies in the way the work explores opposite poles–meaning and meaninglessness, beauty and banality, interest and tedium. On my first visit, when I viewed all 100, they grew boring after a while. But then I began to see the way Ehrlich uses this tedium: the patient viewer soon enters a state in which the difference between six red balls in one picture and four in another seems meaningful. Suddenly one is surprised by the painterliness of tiny shadows behind red cherries. The sensuous green of the molded Jell-O begins to distinguish itself from the confident plastic colors of advertisements: this green is rather gentle, evocative–blending in with yet enlivening the even paler colors of the rest of the scene. Ehrlich’s colors, midway between old master delicacy and advertising flatness, also express her split vision.
