Audrey Barcio: Sight\Line

Audrey Barcio: Untitled, 2021; For Sophie, 2021, both Acrylic and Flashe on stitched canvas. Photo: Becca Schwartz. Courtesy of the artist.

Audrey Barcio, Sight\Line at the Studio at West Sahara

By D.K. Sole

Triangles might be Audrey Barcio’s favourite shape, or maybe pyramids are her favorite form, or perhaps they are conceptually identical in her oeuvre. And her favourite direction might be a sloping line that suggests a triangle reduced to a single active gesture – a triangle in abstract. I had some memory of those things from the time I saw her UNLV MFA thesis exhibition in 2016, before she left Las Vegas for Chicago and the Midwest, where she’s now on the faculty at Ball State University in Muncie. In mid-2022 she came back briefly for a residency at Rogers Art Loft. When I visited Sight\Line I was hoping to see what she’d been doing in the gaps. I mean, I’d looked at small pictures on social media but that’s not the same as seeing it. During her graduate program she had an alchemical interest in the textures and implications of different materials, like hidden fluorescent stripes reflecting colors onto the wall, or porous bricks stacked together, or shining mirrored columns standing upright. She’s not the only artist who tucked fluorescents under the back rims of her paintings, but in her installations it had a sense of mysticism rather than being a technical trick. Her arrangements were controlled and meditative. A rectangle of those porous grey bricks pointed at a dense black circle on the wall, hinting at something that was left deliberately ineffable. “Esoteric science,” as the Sight\Line press release says.

At Sahara West all of that organizational focus had been drawn into the flat planes of her paintings. In the past the paintings were often elements in a larger design – not always, but she would install a room so that the thing on the wall was a touch among other touches, like the hazy white horizontal hovering behind one of the upright mirror columns in a show I remember from the student gallery at Grant Hall. Now the paintings were arranged like curations on their own, with the different shapes inside them behaving like the elements in the larger installations. Abstractions generate movement to invigorate their unreality; these ones were aggressively alive with the implied movement of those slopes. Triangles were laid out as if they were shooting past one another, or butting nose to nose. They radiated sideways or created visual echoes, behaving like reflections or light (I thought back to those mirrored columns; the glowing shapes they cast on the floor were also shardlike). Their movement was highlighted rather than arrested by the presence of other shapes that suggested moments of stoppage: crosses and grids, or lines like the pink vertical one that shoots up near the middle of For Carmen, 2021. That pink vertical wanted to be domineering, but faced with the barrage of sharp angles careening around the canvas all it could do was pray that it didn’t get hurt.

Audrey Barcio, For Carmen, Acrylic, Flashe and mica on stitched canvas, 12” x 10” 2021. Photo by Serena Nancarrow, courtesy of the artist.

The surfaces of some of the paintings had another moment of stoppage as well, physically; they were stitched together. Seams ran across their surfaces. Sewing had allowed her to make faint shifts by creating two areas of a color separately and then fastening them together, creating a slight tonal difference between these two areas. Actions like these placed an emphasis on the act of seeing.

In the press release she equates seeing with wakefulness: “As we move throughout day to night our vision is filled with three-dimensional beauty, digital flatness, and darkness.” Architecture is mentioned, and women. “I’m interested in having women’s structures be seen, because historically they have not been seen.” Women were present not only in the stitching, a method of “structure” she says was inspired by her grandmother, but also in the fact that a number of her triangles are pink with darker nipple-tips. The sharp aggression of these breast-structures (their breastness was emphasised by the way she doubled up the triangles here and there) suggested the Jean-Paul Gaultier cone bra that Madonna made famous in the 1990s. Gaultier’s combination of under- and outerwear performs a kind of visible hiddenness, the same quality that runs throughout her work. Seeing might be living, but sleep is valuable too. There is something else to see while we’re asleep; something that can’t be an artwork. The women in her paintings are detectable and absent. If women are geometry then they conceivably permeate everything in the world, but if they are that ubiquitous then they are not fully distinct. Inside these paintings they had the potential to transform into almost anything at any moment, meshing with their friends to become diamonds, squares, or, in Headlights, 2022, a beam of light, uniting with the artist’s earlier gleams.

Audrey Barcio, Headlights, Acrylic and Flashe on canvas, 50 “× 40” 2022. Photo by Becca Schwartz, courtesy of the artist.

The sewing made me wonder if the less volatile patterns–the ones that are closer to solitary, solid shapes, like the large 54 × 42 inch paintings from 2021 along the back wall–would work as blocks in a quilt. Then I thought of the other elements in terms of quilting as well, and wondered if words like “structure” and “architecture” had distracted me too much with the idea of buildings, stiff things that stood up without flexing, when the method of fitting shapes together here was the method of a quilter, finding inventive ways to manoeuver scraps. Quilts. Quilts as architecture. Architecture as flatness. The Luxor, which was invoked several times, was visualised from above and thereby flattened.* (I’m thinking in particular of the 2022 Untitled with blue diamonds radiating from the centre.) Barcio’s abstraction was a flattening force, searching for essential shapes, essences. Pressed into angles, the breasts voomed around like race cars. They didn’t belong to specific people. If this stitching equalled her grandmother, then that relative was the only person the canvases “named.” (Names are mentioned in some of the titles, but the paintings are “for” them, not “of” them. For Sarah. For Agnes.) In the world of Sight\Line, she is what we see when we sleep.

Audrey Barcio, Vegas Nights, Acrylic, Flashe and mica on canvas, 12” × 10” 2022. Photo by Becca Schwartz, courtesy of the artist.

 *And also from the side in the three Vegas Nights paintings. They were the most mysterious things in the show, because here she had set her creative powers of composition and color aside–everything she had worked so hard to refine–and painted a simplified hotel. A black triangle three times. The shape, on its own, is enough.

Audrey Barcio, Sight\Line
The Studio at West Sahara
June 9-August 26, 2023
9600 W. Sahara Ave. Las Vegas, NV 89117

Published by Wendy Kveck on August 22, 2023.