NANCY HILD: STILL LIFE
A set of nine paintings separately framed in heavy dark wood, Conjunctions: Past Present/Present Past, seems to hold a key to Hild’s project. The objects in this lottery grid or set of tarot cards are named, which gives the viewer an idea of why they’re important to the painter, and possibly to us. The top row includes a chicken leg (Sustenance), a human heart tied and hanging on a rope (Love), and a black-and-white satin high heel (Seduction). The middle row holds a white work glove (Labor), a live barred rock chicken (Maternity), and a lacy black glove (Romance). In the bottom row is a hand with a cigarette (Spirit), a brain in a baggie (Intellect), and a hand holding an egg (Creation). All the objects are painted against a shallow background, generally dark but sometimes colored. The light is ably handled but flat, which increases the sense that the images are intellectual and verbal, essential components of a hermetic vocabulary or arcane science. One wonders whether the elements of the grid can be rearranged: could one, for instance, combine romance and love rather than seduction and love? Could one “read” the sequence down (Sustenance, Labor, Spirit) or diagonally–from upper left to lower right, the chicken leg (Sustenance), the chicken (Maternity), and the egg (Creation)?
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What authority does Hild invoke? The darkness and mystery of the paintings seem to tell us that we can’t know. Modern criticism tells us that there is no authority, that languages and images and the concepts they embody are a collection of ideas, a group of polyphonous voices superimposed and entwined, not placed into the world of a piece by a transcendent being. So the contemporary painter works by selecting some conventions from this century, some from another, objects with layers of meaning, colors and compositions with differing connotations and effects. Hild’s highly worked surfaces, in the modern medium of acrylic, recall a preindustrial past, when painters had the time to slowly work up an illusory world, always in some way curiously parallel to this one.
