There’s a scene in The Rose – a film made in the 1960s about moving Jay de Feo’s enormous work from her tiny apartment – where after the job is done and the place empty, the artist sits on her window sill alone, smoking. It’s charming to see the contrast between the small, hunched over de Feo and her massive, tactile, painterly work that seems to have emerged from the murky depths of the fossil record.

            Allsion Schulnik’s first solo show with Mark Moore Gallery, which I was lucky enough to see in the process of installation, offers up a lot of the same pleasures and seeming contradictions of de Feo’s work, even though it looks very different. The charming and the repulsive, the lush and the stark, the gorgeous and the terrible are all very much present in Schulnik’s canvases, lending a cohesiveness and clarity to the show as a whole and a rewarding paint-fumed (my favorite!) viewing experience.

            Schulnik sculpts with paint. Mark Moore himself put it best: "Thick globs of paint are molded into faces, flowers, and foaming waves, giving me the impression she was using cake frosting at some times." To say her works are tactile would be an understatement; her compositions seem to be built up around the texture and viscosity of oil paint itself.

            Although she works with quite traditional subject matter, the results are anything but. Landscapes dissolve into abstraction below the horizon, figures are all at once animal, human, and supernatural, and flowers are almost too vibrant, vividly colored and in full bloom. 

            There’s a stillness in the work that belies the kinetic application of paint, a sense of isolation among the bounty of color, shape, and texture. The painted equivalent to Jay de Feo on her window sill.

review by Sara Kahlenberg