Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Montreal

Note:

Mara Korkol’s continuing No Place project are dense views of cities in the gloom of evening or the dark of night. They are ‘nowhere places’, quasi-anonymous locations perceived only as they flash by from the seat of a car. 76 is no different in it’s illegibility. The bottom third of the painting seems to cut off the rest of the scene - is this the shadow of the dashboard? The hood of the car? - while the night sky presses down from above. The black spaces of the painting threaten to overwhelm the miniature canvas, pushing itself to the edges and interjecting in the spaces in between the dimly perceived electric lights crowded in the centre.

It’s these lights, however, that Korkola is evidently most interested in. Street lamps are reduced to the haze of their lanterns, casting a light that illuminates nothing but remains concentrated in dense knotted halos. Car lights become a tangled blur of traffic, bleeding into the colours of dimly-perceived signage which flow by with a quiet velocity. All seem to radiate with a murky interiority, refracted back into themselves while revealing nothing (the shapes of cars are revealed only as negative masses, occasionally spotlit by smeared reflections; the street itself is only inferred from the perspectival ranks of the composition). Jewel like, the lights slide across the canvas, lush and fluid ruptures in the edgeless void of an anonymous city.