HESSE FLATOW is pleased to announce Under the Sun, painter Elizabeth Hazan’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Elizabeth Hazan’s hieroglyphic landscape paintings maintain an ambiguous relation to real territories. Large passages of oil in muted oranges, glowing pinks, and cherry red become skies, fields, and rivers, each discrete shape a phrase that links together to depict the world unfurled, top-down, like a roll of seamless photo paper. The sinuous lines that delineate these forms are, as Paul Celan wrote in his 1958 poem “Engfürung” (The Straightening), “driven into the terrain with the unmistakable track.”
Hazan once painted from vintage maps, maintaining a bird’s-eye view of existing topographies. Five years ago, inspired in part by Arshile Gorky’s free-associative landscapes, she began to create intuitive watercolor studies unmoored from any actual vistas. Instead, they originate in sense-memories of childhood summers spent exploring the then-undisturbed farmlands and coastal shorelines of Eastern Long Island. The artist translates her stream-of-consciousness watercolors into oils, altering them as needed as she enlarges them onto linen substrates. Hazan’s paintings are fructuous, constructing and reconstructing themselves in front of their audiences; the artist describes the scenes as what would appear “if you could grow a painting.”
Though landscape paintings are traditionally oriented longitudinally, along the plane of the earth, Hazan employs a vertical format—think Mark Rothko—to better accommodate ground, horizon, and sky. These perpendicular panoramas have a tilt-shift quality, encompassing a perspective on the land that is native to the realm of dreams, where one can hover, suspended, above an imagined world. Their atmospheres are charged with a burning incandescence that heightens the mood, lending them an ecological urgency. While an orange like the one in Woods/Country (2023) once seemed unthinkable, our earth’s changing weather patterns make our environment increasingly surreal. Last June, migrating smoke from Canadian wildfires lent New York’s sky a similar apricot hue. “The place where they lay,” wrote Celan, “has a name - it has none.” Hazan’s undulating brushstrokes lay in this same place, one as specific as a memory and as ineffable as a dream.
