Nancy Constandelia 29 March - 22 April 2023

Untitled Gradient Paintings

Exhibitions

Sydney Contemporary | 2023

Spring1883 Art Fair | 2023

The glow of the moment  

Nancy Constandelia’s first solo exhibition, Unseen (2016), comprised a series of monochromatic  gradient paintings in green, blue, red, and purple, variously toned. The gradients mostly followed  vertical axes, appearing to flow upward and/or downward, a duality achieved through the visual  effect of suffused colour-fade. The imperceptible passage of manifold transitions makes it possible  to reorient Constandelia’s paintings while maintaining their tempo. Rotate a painting and the  gradient cooperates, functioning in other directions.  

In mathematics, the gradient is defined as a ‘rate of change,’ which is precisely what Constandelia  maps in her paintings. Change is what I believe she meant by ‘unseen’ and continues to pursue in  her work. Gradients describe and adapt to change.  

Constandelia followed Unseen (2016) with Making Time (2017), The Deep Empty (2017),  Ephemeros (2018), Slow Motion (2020), and Half past (2021). Time, space, flux, ambivalence, all  leading, gradually, to this exhibition, Untitled Gradient Paintings. Attempts to name the gradient’s  function, to name what she has been chasing all these years, have returned Constandelia to the  abstract gradient itself. ‘In modernism, everything is possible except arriving.’ The flow alone 1 prevails.  

Constandelia exercises gradients in a fascinating range of orchestrations, restricting their  pathways, multiplying them across layers and picture planes, inverting, foregrounding and  backgrounding them, assigning them to the far edges of her paintings, tightly packing them  together and, conversely, isolating them, painting them in various colours and to varying degrees of  transition. Suffice to say that she has, at this point, entered the flow of her gradients, the rhythm  of their continuation.  

Motion and stillness share a notoriously fraught relationship in western modernism, which  Constandelia’s gradients antagonise. Learn of her Chinese heritage and suddenly the gradients  seem less formal. The perceived temporality supersedes pictorial representations to express,  rather, how it registers physically and metaphysically. Reconsider the motion of a gradient as  energy or qi and we find something more universal than linear time or motion: the flow of energy  from one source to another, used, recycled, mapping only entropy.  

In Untitled (2021) a thin gradient band runs vertically through the centre of a small linen substrate.  It appears like a trachea, channeling air in and air out. There is something inherently organic about  the gradient, which Constandelia honours with her deliberately loose tapings and use of linen  surfaces. The subsequent overflows and staining record time and process. But does the gradient  extend or exhaust? Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale: each cycle extends toward exhaustion. It is both  wondrous and confronting to consider how many times this cycle repeats. 

Lee Ufan’s From Line (1979) comes to mind. In it, he has painted twenty-six rudimentarily brushed  lines in blue, one at a time, starting at the top of the canvas with a loaded brush, which dries out as  it approaches the base. From saturation to paucity, each line is like a breath. Lee has painted  gradients many times over in his From Line, From Point, and Dialogue series. For him, like  Constandelia, the objective is to ‘capture and stop the fleeting poetic moment that appears by  chance and then immediately gives way to the everyday world… to construct a momentary, high tension scene and give it universality and continuity.’2 

‘This work of focusing on the glow of the moment saves reality and enriches the experience of  seeing.’3 

James Gatt, 2023  

Tino Sehgal (quoting Gerhard Shulze). (2021). In Modernism Everything Is Possible, Except Arriving: Interview with Thomas 1 Oberender and Tino Seghal. In The Living Exhibition (p.99). Spector Books.  

Lee Ufan. (2018). What Can Be Seen in a Moment. In The Art of Encounter (p.57). Lisson Gallery, London. 2  ibid. 3