STILL LIVES, STILL MOVING: 'PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINES' AT PILAR CORRIAS
- Jemima Jenkins
- Sep 15
- 3 min read
"Pilar Corrias's Conduit Street group show Perpetual Motion Machines investigates the tension between the static stuff of paint and the impetus of the female experience," writes Jemima Jenkins.
Installation view courtesy of gallery
Loie Hollowell shows three new works, The pit and the pendulum in yellow, red and blue (2025). They’re semi-scultural and, like all of Hollowell’s work, responds to the human body as a sensory and transcendent site. This is often an introspective process for Hollowell, known to paint intimate portraits of her vagina as well as producing casts of her evolving pregnant stomach. I am invited to rest my eyes in the meditative grooves of iterating shapes and undulating colour; a glowing red clitoris is staring at me in the face, literally protruding from the surface of the canvas. Hollowell’s work is concerned with depicting the body experiencing pleasure — or śakti, the primordial, dynamic energy invoked by the Neo-Tantrics as feminine — rather than the WOMAN that society lumps on her back. Her work embraces a more expansive state of being, a light filled experience; on an epic scale, the visual impact of Hollowell’s paintings may be analogous to James Turrell’s immersive light installations.
Loie Hollowell, The pit and the pendulum in yellow/red/blue, 2025
Cutting through the gallery’s white expanse is Pacita Abad’s Red Kaleidoscope (1998-2004), suspended from the ceiling and swaying in the centre of the exhibition– its motion is testament to the soft and swelling female form. Abad drew influence from the Indonesian Batik tradition and indigenous textiles, yet her vibrant hand-embroidered trapuntopaintings are animated with the droop of the human body. Grasshopper (1985) — padded canvas streaked with green and blue lines and adorned with plastic buttons, evokes the jasper sheen of the insect’s back— wafts languidly close by.
Pacita Abad, Grasshopper, 1985
Abad’s work mingles with Tschabalala Self’s larger than life portraits Madame and Black Blonde (2025) on the far wall. The phrase ‘cut from the same cloth’ comes to mind; Abad’s rich abstractions reflected in the eclectic textiles of Self’s modern women. Self’s depictions of the black female figure have been deconstructed and rearranged through the process of collage; stories of personal and cultural hybridity are infused and impressed through printmaking into the fabrics and sewn to the slashed canvas itself.
From left to right: Tschabalala Self, Madame, 2025, Tschabalala Self, Madame, 2025
Then, light from the surrounding street facing windows glitters on the surface of two ginormous works by Mickalene Thomas. The visage is an assemblage of pattern and texture: fragments are blocked out in paint with a Julian Opie-esque polish, some in thick impasto and others brimming with her trademark rhinestones.
Thomas toys with the aesthetics of 20th-century Cubism, the movement in which Picasso was a pioneer and created portraits under the same French title Tête de Femme. Fittingly, some segments are thickly painted to mimic sticky tape, a self-referential motif that signals collage as a labour of love, repair and representation. However, while the paint might be fresh, this series has been stretched across a decade — its dazzling impact is beginning to dim.
If Christine Quarles’ painting depicts a machine of sorts, it is one that has grown sullen from its performativity. Raised in Los Angeles, visiting the fake film sets of New York at Paramount Studios where her mother worked, Quarles cites the early influence of the artifice and play characteristic of LA’s film industry. Flat royal blue paint frames Quarles’ painting like curtains, which play out the perpetual motion of a life on stage: the absurd condition of being a bag of flesh and also a participant in society’s charades.
Here, in the gallery, the embodied experience butts up against society’s false walls and is enfolded in a snare of identity and perception, an abstract entity staggers into being.
Perpetual Motion Machines is on from the 9th of July 27 September 2025.
