A Bit of Geneva in Basel

There is something special about a work that keeps you on your toes by revealing itself to a certain point while remaining firmly mysterious. I had that experience while looking at Janiva Ellis’s show Geneva at Kunsthalle Basel, with a selection of mostly large, almost billboard-sized panoramic scenes that touch on subjects like religion, surroundings, and eroticism.

As I was walking around the main room, observing the works up close and from afar, I kept realizing how difficult it is to write about them. Largely because they’re almost never straightforward, they feel intense within their explosive murkiness. Borrowing elements from cartoons, mythologies, science fiction, and anatomy, they feel like a constant game of suggestion and withdrawal. The fact that one painting in a show titled Geneva, on view in Basel, depicts Zurich says a bit about the mindset behind these sensory and cognitive traps. The moment you see an element or part of them that looks familiar, another element appears that instantly sabotages the sense of understanding. And as a non-artist myself, but someone who looks at a lot of work, I can imagine it is extremely difficult to build images that lean on misrecognition as a dominating quality.

Sometimes it’s the pure darkening behind which the imagery disappears; other times, it's their overlapping or even the corner or stairway install, but the works just refuse to settle in the traditional way. Such elements not only turn the painting into a raw record of a physical struggle but also convey the notion that identity and history are messy, unresolved processes. This puts the viewer in the demanding position of responding to the work individually, figuring out what they’re looking at and perhaps how it is achieved. Besides this cryptic appeal, these canvases are beautifully painted with washes of paint that evoke this charged atmosphere and allow this ambiguity to persist. Employing bold, almost graffiti-like strokes, refined passages, loose smears, and passages of semi-resolved underpainting, these paintings take the viewer's eye and mind on a chaotic joyride through narratives, perspectives, or logical systems. —Saša Bogojev