Simplicity can feel visionary in a way that a more striving, complicated approach can fail to achieve. Jenene Nagy, in her exhibition “While navigating the distance around the sun,” reduced the materials for her art to the simplest measure: paper and graphite. Those elements evoke multiple connotations of the primary: from grade-school supplies—pencils, lined paper—to the immediacy of a sketch in a notebook. There is an immediacy of utmost concern evident in her work as well: a care for close connection. This proximity is spatial and temporal, yet her sense of time does not center around an accumulation of hours demarcating life into the fateful tenses of future, present, and past. Nagy’s investigation is an experiment in thinking about the passage of days differently, in which the planet’s turn around the sun doesn’t bring us simply to another year, but takes us back to the point from which we began, returning us to our origin, a place in which creation is ongoing, mythical, and somehow—impossible to explain—eternally nascent.
The Weight, 2016, made from graphite on paper, feels like a fundamental example of the artist’s binding vision, epic but singular. The work is immense—some twenty feet long and six and a half feet high. And though its vastness calls to mind Picasso’s Guernica, 1937, there is no spectacle, only meditation. The light of the gallery gently illuminated the work’s grisaille surface, and as the eye adjusted, one saw that Nagy’s piece is comprised of minute rubbings that call to mind tally marks, used not for counting, but for some other form of gathering that produces meaning. The paper has also been folded into isosceles triangles that measure no more than seven inches per side, accentuating the graphite’s subtle vibrancies. At certain moments, the pattern coalesces into squares, rectangles, and hexagons, as if one is watching a universe unfurling, a cosmic plenum of a kind, a whole that asks a question about what it is to be whole, not on the level of mimetic representation, but as a deeper form of verisimilitude. The hand makes first what the mind realizes later. Nagy invites us into that experience, showing us how filling one small shape, as humble as the gesture seems, points to a cosmic principle: that from a place of is-not, an is comes to be. It is a thought as old as Parmenides, as Zen, as artmaking itself.
Nagy’s art of devotion evokes that of Ad Reinhardt’s in its slow and sensuous opticality, making patience a prelude to pleasure. As with The Weight, we can also detect Agnes Martin’s spiritual geometry in the more intimate palm grid 6, 2019, an enigmatic drawing executed in graphite and gouache on palm-frond paper that was created by Nagy herself. Embedded in this substrate are shiny flakes of mica, like stars, adumbrated by intersecting vertical and horizontal lines that form a lattice of small boxes, each no more than five millimeters square and filled with a daub of white paint. With this piece, the artist’s care doesn’t seem to be in regard to the cumulative whole, but centered on the myriad discrete elements. Sometimes the gouache is very opaque; sometimes it seems the barest wash. Every quadrate is an attempt at cool perfection that collapses, making it undeniably human. What could be airless precision instead embodies Wallace Stevens’s insight that “the imperfect / is our paradise.”
Indeed, there is something paradisical (though not necessarily Edenic) about Nagy’s work, which is full of necessary and revelatory errors that teach us to love this errant world, like Lucretius’s clinamen—the slight swerve that allows existence to exist. I saw it everywhere in this show, especially in the works mass 16, 17, 18, and 19, all 2018, which are created from carefully torn strips of paper and a graphite paint made by the artist. Each individual work, roughly three feet square, holds a pattern in relief. Torn strips of paper descend vertically, others cross horizontally, and where they overlap a small square rises. The shape punctuates the work with a dynamic, diagonal rhythm, the haptic presence of its geometric vibrancy recalling the scarification on the skin of ancient tribes—pattern as faith of a kind. It’s a revelation of squares: as profound a prayer as I know.
— Dan Beachy-Quick
