3. ALLOIS: PERSONAGES
“Allois paints presences. Her figures manifest conditions, sliding away from
personality and into mood. A particular character may present itself as a child or
adult, man or beast, but its identity gives way almost immediately to its nuance.
Mourners are not just sad; they become sadness. Nudes cavorting with animals
are not just modest; they become modesty itself. Personages making their way
through a landscape come to embody self-containment, self-absorption. This is
real abstraction, a dissolution of the seen into the sensed.
The humanoids (and animoids)Allois paints exhibit many of the same distortions
and contortions that we see in so much current “lowbrow,” or “newbrow,”
painting. But instead of employing an illustrator’s insistent descriptive precision,
so prevalent in “newbrow,” Allois engages the brush and palette of a modern
painter, luminously impressionist, impetuously expressionist, oddly surrealist,
providing her characters with soul even as she compromises their visual substance
– indeed, by compromising that substance. She renders her figures vaguely, but
they are not vague; as ciphers for sensations and sensibilities, they must be fuzzy
to the eye in order to be credible to the heart.
Do Allois’ characters and creatures tell stories? Of a sort; they are active,
always engaged in doing something. But before their efforts harden into events,
they evolve into a dream state where purpose fades into symbol. Do they seem
like fugitives from a children’s book, or a comic strip? They seem related to such
storytelling formats, but resist telling such stories. They are fugitives only from
Allois’ own imagination – or from her own dreams. Some seem so primitive, so
4. atavistic, that they ring some far-off bell of familiarity in our minds. Some seem
not simply alien, but related to the alien caricature that has suffused through
our popular culture – the slight bodies, swollen hairless heads, huge slit eyes
and pointy chins taking off from the description provided by witnesses to the
“autopsies” supposedly performed on spacemen by the U.S.Army at LosAlamos
in the late 1940s.
These figures, then, are others and at the same time are us. They don’t simply
constituteAllois’cast of characters; they stand in for any of us.The yogic construct
of the soul is as a tiny homunculus seated or curled at the base of the heart. This
must be the homunculus with whom, in many variations, Allois populates her
canvases”.
Peter Frank
Union #1, 2012
Oil on gesso board
40 in x 30 in
