eri king, Scripted Spaces
eri king, Wild Card (detail), 2024, Oil on canvas. Photo by D.K. Sole
eri king, Scripted Spaces at Available Space Art Projects
by D.K. Sole
Why do people look at art? I suppose we want to, we like it, we’re gaining something, whatever that means for us individually. Not money, but something else. Like the casino guests that eri king implies in her Vegas-inspired paintings here, we’re prisoners of desire. The artist, like a casino, has tactics that keep us spending time with her.
She plays slippery jokes with camouflage. Casino carpets are funny! The blatant game of confusing you with ostentatious patterns: how totally silly that is, so basic, so obvious. But that obviousness makes me uneasy: is that all: what’s the catch? What am I letting them get away with? A disembodied hand in one painting holds up a playing card, but the hand merges with her carpet-patterned background and the card at first looks as if it’s levitating. A cupid in another painting is pulling an arrow back in a motion that seems normal until I realise it has placed one end of the bow over its eye, making it semi-blind. When I asked king about it she said she had been thinking of the maquettes that Reubens used to model some of his figures, how the experience of being able to see around the motionless limbs distorted the bodies in a similar way. I looked at that weird stiffness. (I’m thinking now of the real-but-not affect of casinos like Caesars Palace and the unnatural cleanliness of the canals in the Venetian, the theatrical unlived-in look–or not unlived-in, but not lived in as real streets are lived in. A city with the aesthetics of a shopping mall, like the unusual smoothness of the paint here that shows nothing of the canvas weave underneath–the canvas is camouflaged as something totally flat, a wood panel, a computer screen.)
She said the altar-like step forms in another work were references to the paintings she’d seen in situ in European churches–Tiepolos– the fact that you had to walk past candelabras and architecture to reach them. You stepped up. They weren’t just unobstructedly there. She buries the church steps under more casino carpet. That carpet eats everything. The world is smothered in casino. Fluted classical columns stand around implied doorways that open onto more swirling patterns instead of space. Step inside and I too would be carpeted.
The shadows of the cupids are flat and monochrome, binding them to the background rather than establishing a separation through the evocation of space. Everything seems superimposed and merging at the same time. The fact that king has chosen painting–when she could have used sculpture or installation as she’d done in the past–suggests to me that she believes this game of camouflage and false space is particularly a quality of two-dimensional representation. The canvas is a space where things can be meshed with a completeness that three dimensions don’t let you get away with. The thing says, “This is fake, this is camouflage,” but it’s the only thing that’s there. Camouflaging what? The action she’s preventing with her nullified doorways is the kind of movement that people praise when they say how much they love realistic landscapes: “It’s as if I could step into the picture and walk around!”
But honestly, I’ve said all this because I’m influenced by the exhibition blurb. “Her work illuminates the subtle interplay between perception and control, raising questions about the environments we move through and how they shape our desires and actions,” etc, etc. When I first began to look at the false exits and null-spots in the works my mind went not to desire but to death. That was partly because I’d been reading Maurice Maeterlinck’s Before the Great Silence, a book that describes death as a real but unknowable state* (king’s painted carpets make their imaginary environments unknowable; the space that swallows and converts you is death) and partly because of a painting I haven’t mentioned yet, Heaven or Las Vegas, a work that buries the words in the title inside a carpet pattern from a casino her late grandmother liked. It’s the earliest work in Scripted Spaces. When I was thinking about the show through that lens it occurred to me that her paintings of cascading cards from Microsoft Word’s computer Solitaire tells you a game has concluded but the process of the game itself is not revealed. It’s implicitly past, unknowable, and over, gone forever. I saw a fathomless gap. A painting’s act of reaching out for engagement is also an endless craving, you’re always aware that the painter has fewer resources available to them than other types of artist–they can’t fill space as easily as a sculptor, their sensual physicality is more dependent on your imagination. I think of king telling me how much her experience of the Tiepolo was affected by the big rooms and the candelabras and I think, well, so she’s aware of it. The more a painting can make you desire it, engage with it, the more fully your imagination fleshes out its presence. Why do paintings want to trap us? Because the more trapped we are, the realler they become.
*for example, “Life is a secret; death is the key that opens it; but he who turns the key disappears forever into the secret.” (Translated by Bernard Miall.)
Posted and published by Wendy Kveck on May 6, 2025.