Gerri Rachins’ raptorial abstractions

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / While some art pulls you in gently, Gerri Rachins’ paintings, now on display at The Painting Center, grab you like a raptor. Though unequivocally abstract, their affect, as it were, is prehensile. They seem to guard the walls, flexing with taut line and pulsing color, at once opaque and fluid. Especially illustrative examples include A Dark Vault in the Light of Day, Heavy Metal Ballerina, Where Pink Iguanas and Giant Tortoises Live, and the positively predatory Expert So-and-So’s. Quite incongruously with the archly prosaic title of the show, “Getting from One Place to the Other,” these and other works, often inspired by nature yet resolutely introspective, radiate organic aggression. If, as Carl Little observes in his catalogue essay, they scan as facsimiles of Rorschach inkblots, they overwhelmingly encourage ominous interpretations. The visual means of generating these qualities are webbed, exoskeleton-like forms, thickly painted, that lend structure and an overarching allusion of peril to her compositions and anchor their controlled graphic turbulence.

Rachins is in esteemed aesthetic company. Her paintings here have an energy and visual thrust akin to some of the Jackie Saccoccio’s irrepressibly kinetic work – in particular, the small, untitled gouaches that Saccoccio showed at Chart Gallery in her last New York exhibition in 2020, the year of her death. But Saccoccio’s translucent, gestural pieces convey a lightness that suggests transience and elusiveness – the beauty or poignancy of a replete moment of reflection cherished precisely by virtue of its fleeting nature – and she was clear about her preoccupation with impermanence and her drive to “make a static object seem like it’s moving.” In contrast, Rachins’ predominantly saturated color – rendered mainly in Flashe and acrylic ink on paper, occasionally tempered by watercolor – yields seemingly impermeable images that register constancy and inescapability. It’s the almost morbidly insistent inertia of paintings like Hidden Moon, Trying to Peer into Time Where We Have Little Knowledge, Unequivocal Remnant of a Living Organism, and Weighing Device that afford them a distinctive power that complements Saccoccio’s.

Usually, Rachins’ chief intent seems to be to impart enduring intensity rather than dynamic instability – the better to focus the paintings on the viewer, which circles back to their disarmingly harrowing vibe. In a couple of works – The Boundary Between the Core and the Mantle and Knitting Itself Back Together – this aim is close to explicit. A few contrapuntal paintings in the series are less confined and self-bound, and more lighthearted. Highly Caffeinated Lemonade, Of Increasing Time, Speed, and Velocity, On the Cusp of a Big Shift, and Quick and Dirty all incorporate more tenuous line and washier colors to imply movement or flight. They may serve as a kind of control group, ironically indicating the artist’s own disinclination. As the show’s title painting suggests in its fitful, sanguineous horizontal progression, getting from one place to another can be an arduous affair. Rachins wants her audience to face what haunts them, and her compelling paintings urge them to do so.

“Gerri Rachins: Getting from One Place to Another,” The Painting Center, 547 West 27th Street, New York, NY. Through March 29, 2025.

About the author: Jonathan Stevenson is a New York-based policy analyst, editor, and writer, contributing to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Politico, among other publications, and a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.