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Mar. 2--Cecilia Edefalk is a Swedish artist in her early 50s who has been exhibiting in Europe for almost 20 years, but her first solo show in the United States is taking place only now at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Edefalk is a painter, though like many these days, she wants to be known as more than that, so as the brochure accompanying the exhibition puts it: "She is a profound and sensitive thinker who also happens to be a painter, and her concerns as an artist extend beyond the specific limits of the medium."
That sort of statement usually means trouble, as artists' "concerns" often can extend so far beyond the specific limits of the medium that they are not embodied by their paintings. When the paintings are representational, as are Edefalk's, you can be fairly sure this is the case, for the practice of depicting objects in a recognizable manner is now considered such a paltry thing that a savvy artist's interest just has to lie elsewhere.
In the paintings at the institute -- all shown for the first time -- Edefalk's visual interest seems to lie in the relationships among a specific sculpture, a photograph of it and paintings made from that image. But because she works with the samesculptural motif in the same limited palette in different sizes, her actual interest would appear to be in some sort of relationship between an original painting and its variations, copies or duplicates.
In any event, the artist took a photograph of a garden statue of Venus, which she softly reproduced in pale blue, black and white. Several variations occur in the paintings of the same sculpture that followed, culminating in a large painting of the sculpture upon which a slide of a small one -- again by Edefalk -- has been projected. Throughout, the painting, as painting, is sometimes barely there, and at its best it suggests a ghostly 21st Century version of a late 19th Century French decoration.
In earlier series, Edefalk also worked with images, such as one from a film by Laurel and Hardy, that were distant from her in time. And though she maintained the works were "about" something other than what was depicted, surely she had to be aware of the image's nostalgic, if not whimsical, resonance. Here her nocturnal garden image prompts countless earlier artistic associations, and they work to the benefit of the paintings, even if her story of why she chose the motif -- told in the gallery brochure -- revels less in an opportunity for poetry or mystery than in the minutiae of a personal experience that in essence was banal.
A decade ago Gaylen Gerber painted the objects on his workbench again and again in canvases flirting with invisibility. That was a tough-minded investigation into painting, so tough in fact that the artist was led to abandon optical stimulation entirely. Edefalk's paintings, despite her best intentions, still stimulate the eye and, in consequence, communicate more elusive, flickering feeling than hardheaded thought. The interesting thing here -- a sign of the times -- is that to be cutting-edge contemporary now means ignoring the former in the interest of the latter.
"Focus: Cecilia Edefalk: Double White Venus" will continue at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave., through April 23. 312-443-3600.
aartner@tribune.com
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