Shiri Mordechay and Pablo Garcia's “Modern Medieval”

Shiri Mordechay, Sweet Grapes (grapes and lamb), detail, 2023, 34”x51” watercolors on paper. Courtesy Ivy Brown Gallery.

“Modern Medieval”
Shiri Mordechay and Pablo Garcia                                
Ivy Brown Gallery
January 23-February 23, 2025

By MARK BLOCH, February 2025

Perhaps a bit Medieval, Pablo Garcia’s sculptural works also conjured up the later Baroque period, an era which was literally named after “a deformed pearl,”  when heavy-handed artists regularly overdid ornamentation on fluted, gilded, scalloped and molded surfaces. Garcia’s ornamented and exaggerated but classically-inspired compositions are similarly executed with a high level of technical skill. He seems interested in protecting us from something possibly awful and dangerous. But what? Nearby, Shiri Mordechay’s works on paper might be stand-ins for that ghastly horridness as they are somewhat Medieval but more accurately defy time completely. Her dark and macabre scenes, infused with a playful sense of humor, create compelling tension that beckoned a half-stymied intellectual contemplation within me that then went figuratively crashing into Garcia’s sculptural roadblocks, conveniently placed nearby, as her paintings inspired a confused but full emotional engagement that then felt in need of temporary relief.

“Modern Medieval” exhibition, Shiri Mordechay and Pablo Garcia, Installation view, Ivy Brown Gallery, January 23-February 23, 2025. Courtesy Ivy Brown Gallery.

“Modern Medieval” was a two-person exhibition featuring striking watercolor works by Mordechay and unusual 3-D constructions by Garcia. The inspiration for this exhibit was conceived when the two artists shared a studio space at the 4 Heads Residency on Governors Island which triggered a dialogue about time and historical reference suggesting connections between different epochs, presumably the Medieval and our own. I attended a closing tour through the gallery on a recent snowy night by the artists to bridge any gaps.

Pablo Garcia, Neuroethics for Elon, 2023. Fence, concertina wire, silk fibers, aluminum wires,carabiners, buckles. 80x48x4 inches. Courtesy Ivy Brown Gallery.

Garcia’s science background brought him to assemble yes, perhaps Medieval elements in pieces that were literally halting: raw silk fiber and barbed wire compositions vertically layered onto chain link fence bases meant to stop us in our tracks.  With varying amounts of fence showing,  I felt the works were more powerful when the fence was present but less visible. The smaller pieces placed between Mordechay’s works were also less effective than their larger counterparts or the two others, freestanding across the room, reaching powerfully into space, tree-like, suggesting embellished Brancusis and supporting top heavy "head"-like structures that gently bounced, when touched, on their weighted bases. Neuroethics for Elon, topped with razor wire, foreboding in its density, excelled against the rough-hewn southern wall of the gallery. A Christmas Battle, placed between two windows, was more welcoming, focused on a reflective ball punctuating its middle, revealed by its title to be a religious subject—a Christmas tree ornament that was more attractive in its platonic abstractness than the orb identified in the title and by the artist explaining that it referred to Yuletide battles in Ukraine and Gaza, pointing out further that the bulb dangled from the wire outline of an aircraft. His attempts at messaging were helped by mystery, and adorned with rope, cylindrical disks, belts with bullet shapes and spikes, there was plenty to go around. These adorned objects curiously created temporary boundaries between themselves and their surroundings, maybe separating themselves even from Garcia, or perhaps us or each other. Like most artists and their work, though, Garcia seemed intertwined and intimately familiar with his.

Shiri Mordechay, Fertile Crescents (long dogs) 2023, 51”x48” watercolor and mixed media on paper  Courtesy Ivy Brown Gallery.

Mordechay, on the other hand, seemed respectfully estranged from her own creations, unwilling to trample on the delicate but inherent life force that lurked within them. Her half of this show are five large works on paper, and six framed small ones. Fertile Crescents almost looked abstract until, upon closer observation,  long dachsund-like shapes, framed by cross hatching, were revealed, leaping over clusters of horse-dogs and a barechested woman—exposed, deformed, exaggerated. Sweet Grapes, a trio of baby-bird-hybrid beings under low hanging fruit—featured one with a seriously contorted neck under an elaborate centuries-old Dutch Masters style collar seen elsewhere wrapped around a clown in one of the smaller works. An almost forgettable third figure in Monkey at Sea mysteriously muffled the purity of two elephant boys facing each other with monkeys on their heads while a praying mantis crawled up one monkey, creating a food chain rebus that all the players splashed around in together in an explosion of carefully rendered water. Play Room showed two young girls flanking an other-worldly metaphysical snake-vehicle— a spiraling serpent cylinder spatially echoing a bed headboard above it, festooned with five green dog-alligators with lizard feet barely peeking out in case there was any doubt that there were reptiles involved. Finally, a sybaritic Mount Rushmore of five hideous masked characters were positioned against a realistic bird perched above, surveying blue lizards, grasshoppers, beetles, lady bugs, a rodent, a frog below, surrounded by dry brush cross hashing with a graveyard of lots of accumulated dead stuff at the bottom.

Shiri Mordechay, Play Room (green dragon) 2023, 31” x 44” watercolor and sequin on paper. Courtesy Ivy Brown Gallery.

Some art occupies a knowing space that telegraphs to observers what and where they all are, accompanied by other pertinent information, related to their mutual orientation. Correctly or incorrectly, via self-aware, sure-footed signals, confidence, crispness, and clarity get conveyed. Shiri Mordechay’s work is not that kind of art. Like a disorienting but compelling dream that cannot quite be remembered, it is, instead, liminal, pre-liminal, even, confounding in its opacity, a mysterious, ambiguous field from which, despite layers of post-Surrealist color, form, line, technique, style and plenty of content, little to no contextual information escapes, a milieu and positioning black hole, sucking into itself any ambient identifying data.

Shiri Mordechay, Blue Lizard (blue lizard) 2023 51” x 35” watercolor on paper. Courtesy Ivy Brown Gallery.

Yet, here are some data points: the Medieval here was evoked by thoughts of pre-Surrealist milestones like Hieronymus Bosch's triumphant triptych, the maximalist Garden of Earthly Delights which brought Heaven and Hell to Earth, or Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s trompe l'oeil transformation of fruit, flowers, insects and fish into human profiles. While Mordechay’s paintings do indeed include faces, often sinking right into the paper, the totality of her compositions barely cohere into much that is particularly familiar to the parts of the brain designed to recognize patterns and/or make sense of one’s surroundings. She does however, upon forced inquest, admirably bring to mind not only Bosch but certain Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painters that followed him, such as the unlikely and coincidentally feminist Pieter Brueghel the Elder, a painter and printmaker who smashed rigid gender roles while manifesting the artform of overwhelm called “Wimmelbilder,” or “busy pictures” that exploded with complexity in highly detailed depictions of battle scenes, cityscapes, and chaotic dining chambers teeming alternately with life and death. Mordechay also elicits 16th century Antwerp artists like Joos de Momper or Pieter Huys, doing their best to anticipate nascent versions of Salvador Dali’s paranoid-critical method in their landscapes. May I also mention Sheela Na Gigs, church- and castle-perching gargoyles, the exaggerated vulva-spreading, Middle Ages-era figurative carvings of naked women above doorways and windows across Europe? architectural grotesques hearkening back to pre-Christian fertility or mother goddess religions with legs splayed, revealing murky black triangles flanked by hands resting upon thighs? These examples of early yoni art, while common, were earthly outliers in previous worlds obsessed by depicting mostly beauty, the heavens and occasional spiritual damnation in which the mysterious and the baudy was considered unpleasant and avoided like the, um, plague. Rough-hewn whiskered faces and clumpy hands by David Teniers the Younger, a Flemish Baroque painter and printmaker are examples of his prolific output in many genres including his invention of the “peasant” genre, depicting both taverns and dignified alchemists and physicians. Mordechai also elicits the Swiss painter and writer on art, Henry Fuseli, who spent his life in Britain depicting supernatural experiences, which had a considerable influence on younger British artists, including the sublime William Blake. Also in England, more recently, the  Georgian era caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson’s political satire rife with social observations and the subscription-based morality tales of  the engraver William Hogarth make me wonder if I am subconsciously remembering art linked intrinsically to ethics, even though I sense no judgement in Morechay’s rub-your-nose-in-it watercolors. Hogarth, combative with the art of the European Continent, succumbed to French influence in his 'Analysis of Beauty’ published in 1753 while the French painter and printmaker Honoré Daumier’s social and political commentary in that turbulent land between 1830 and 1870 revolutions also exemplifies Mordechay’s willingness to face hard-to-take difficulty head on. Which brings me to our own (some of us) overflowingly unpleasant 20th century in which an artist like Otto Dix’s celebrations of the human body thrived in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s. Uncomfortable streets are depicted haunted by the crippled WWI soldiers circulating amongst nudes, prostitutes and other emblems of a physically and morally damaged society, perhaps not so different from what simmers beneath our own. In fact, all of these comparisons speak to something timely and unidentifiable within myself that I probably long to sweep under some rug. Dix and other German Dada compatriots eventually painted satirical portraits of German intellectuals and celebrities, making themselves targets of the Nazis. Deftly combining realism with the fantastic to create allegorical sharp-eyed depictions of human figures that were not political subjects but mere mortals doing chores between world wars, brings to mind the Spanish Surrealist Remedios Varo, born in a small town in Catalonia: a woman immersed in authors like Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as mystical and Eastern spiritual writings. As a teen she became interested in dreams and themes by Federico García Lorca, Luis Buñuel and Rafael Alberti, while swallowing whole the work of her countrymen Dali and El Greco at the Prado along with Francisco Goya, often called both The Last Old Master and The First of the Moderns. There is something deeply stirring, profound and unapologetic in the work of all the artists I have mentioned and all of it points to Modechay’s work. Thus do Varo (and Mordechay) resonate with many female (and male) Dada and Surrealist partners in crime, like Dix (and Goya) before them. The (not a crime) ambiguities of Mordechay call forth a full history of visionaries, known and unknown, groping in the anti-heroic darkness that surrounds us.

Shiri Mordechay, "Monkey at Sea" (elephant nose) 2023, 37”x 51” watercolors on paper. Courtesy Ivy Brown Gallery.

Stretching from Bosch to the Beat poets to a Holden Caulfield, our societal aspirations, twisted, disfigured and rendered plainly, have morphed toward the dark side, to our collective delight. Even Vince Gilligan, who created Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, recently asked the audience at an awards show if writers might search their souls for less ill-lit subject matter. That said, may I conclude by invoking the bold, frenetic, exaggerated lines, splatters, and spilled dirty water of the expressive Ralph Steadman, the artist who illustrated Hunter S. Thompson’s writings in the pages of Rolling Stone, then simulated in the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas film directed by Terry Gilliam? Should I cite the now forgotten unforgetable 1989 movie by Peter Greenaway, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover or the current Oscar nominee The Substance starring Demi Moore?

Shiri Mordechay, detail, "Monkey at Sea" (elephant nose) 2023, 37”x51” watercolors on paperCourtesy Ivy Brown Gallery.

Enough pointed reference points within black holes. Suffice to say I was moved by Mordechay's paintings, her whirlwinds of deep feeling and layered nuance, which drew this viewer appreciatively into a vibrating, electrified, if diaphanous, world. Each detailed piece felt constructed with hidden metaphysical care, causing my eye to dart from section to section, unsure why my frenzied gaze would settle anywhere at all. Mordechay’s watercolors, sensorily rich in signifiers, generated a narrative between past and present, remaining formless, unmanifested, ethereal, a netherworld poised between interludes, difficult to put one’s finger on. But Mordechay, the dweller in that place, has allowed her creations to end up there, channelling divine forces, her subconscious close to the surface. She plays conduit between worlds outside and an inner consciousness. Her elusive subject matter, stand-ins for hints, ideas, ancient languages of grunts, inklings and primordial passions, mere marks on paper, became the enigmatic forces we see executed by actors in a play or dancers on a stage, disorderly carnivals of devout drama—sketchily familiar, human, beautiful, bizarre, savage and terrifying, heaving and hurling about in frozen landscapes, awaiting a thaw. WM