In Thrilling Palettes, Ilana Savdie Maps Electrifying Geographies
Ilana Savdie begins her works by drawing. Disjointed limbs and razor sharp nails, burrowed in seas of black ink, inform the nine new paintings that comprise Swimming in Contaminated Waters, the artist’s first solo exhibition at Deli Gallery. Savdie scans and manipulates these drawings digitally, dividing and aggregating body parts among thrilling palettes to map new geographies altogether. When transferred to canvas, these scenes electrify.
In “Waiting to emerge as catastrophe” (2021) ribbons of marbled beeswax meet peripatetic streaks of cobalt, coiling and contorting like intestines around a meandering staircase. A phallic figure spiked with threatening fingernails presides over the anarchic scene. Neat pools of color barely contain the unease in this work, positioned amid a looming cascade of humbly sized yet arresting paintings that command the gallery.
Fragments of color tend to quake with anticipation as if waiting to be ignited. I thirst for release in small works like “ashes, ashes, we all fall down” (2020), wherein hazardous pinks fuel imposing figures that never quite surrender to an orbit of magnetic blues. Comparably destabilizing, a torso with outstretched legs plummets nonchalantly into a mélange of explosive pigments in “Low pitch complicity” (2020).
Consistently, Savdie’s methodical approach to color forewarns of the latent chaos in scenes that teeter on the brink of disarray. Throughout Swimming in Contaminated Waters, Savdie gleans chaos from the body, a site she repeatedly excavates and mines to herald unrest.