Tracy Thomason 2025 by Miles McEnery Gallery

TRACY THOMASON: VENUS

Jessica Holmes

How storied is Venus, earth’s neighbor in the solar system. A celestial body that rotates retrograde compared to the rest of the planets in the solar system, and whose year is shorter than its day—a surreal, almost impossible fact for the human mind to wrap itself around—Venus pilots herself against the grain. Were you to stand on Venus, you would stand outside of time as it’s measured here on our own planet. Though of course standing on Venus is an impossibility, protected as she is from our intrusions by a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide, making temperatures deliriously hot and inhospitable to humanity. Dense clouds of sulfuric acid that envelop Venus reflect the rays of the sun, making her easy to spot in the night sky. To us, terrestrially bound, only the sun and moon are brighter orbs.

That Venus is such a dazzler made her especially alluring to the ancients. The Romans named the planet for their goddess of love and beauty, who was appropriated from the Greeks’ Aphrodite, an even earlier iteration. The Greeks in turn modeled Aphrodite on the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, the ruler of war, fertility, and sexual love. Seraphic Venus has always been defined as a feminine persona, but the ancients’ conception of “feminine” was not one that relegated womanhood to dainty pursuits or submissive exertions. Femininity was its own paradigm of ferocity, an opposing, but equal, energy that counterbalanced and complemented masculinity. In Western astrology, the planet Venus rules over love, pleasure, beauty, and art. And of course, Venus has always been a favored subject among artists, embodying dualities as she does: the carnal and the immaterial, the sensual and the violent, the erotic and the divine.

Tracy Thomason has conceived her most recent paintings within this vast and fabled framework. In doing so, she has been able to pluck from, and synthesize, various reference points across time in works that deftly meet our contemporary moment. Embodying critic Nancy Princenthal’s astute observation that since the turn of the millennium, female artists often tend not to “see quotidian life as a fixed, generic backdrop for a quarantined field of internal experience; instead, they are concerned with how psyche, body, and culture shape each other.”1 Thomason renders the corporeal, the referential, the cosmological, and the dialectical in complex paintings that exist outside of time. If one pictures time not as a straight line but as a spiral, as Thomason likes to imagine it, none of these antecedents are anachronistic; instead, they are logical layers ensconced within the artist’s visual language.

Thomason has developed her sophisticated methods of layering over the course of a nearly twenty-year career during which she has absorbed influences and harmonized reference points on her canvas. As the granddaughter and daughter of artists (Thomason’s maternal grandmother was a painter, and her mother a graphic designer), her immersion in art began early. Thomason, who was born and raised in Maryland, remembers that when she was a child her grandmother, who lived in New Mexico, would send her stones, so she could have the tactile experience of seeing and feeling the rocks for herself—so alien were they to an East Coast landscape. Her early appreciation of the mineral world eventually developed into an advanced understanding of her materials, which unfold across her surfaces in uneven terrain that could be construed as topographical, carnal, or extraterrestrial. That is, her phenomenological experience is paramount to and implicit in her work.

So, too, is the expenditure of her physical body inherent in every canvas. The artist’s somatic exertions on her surfaces leave a lasting imprint on each artwork. Making a slurry of gesso mixed with chipped stone, marble dust, or calcium carbonate (or some combination of these materials), Thomason accretes the crags and mountainous ridges that make up the three-dimensional, frie-

1 Nancy Princenthal, “Spellbound,” The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium, ed. Eleanor Heartney, et. al. (Munich: Prestel, 2013), 73.

zelike elements of her paintings. She also uses stone carving tools to gouge into the dense material, leaving slashes and deep grooves that counterbalance the bumpy ranges. It’s of note that beneath her luminous color lies an alabaster surface that calls to mind both an other-planetary landscape and a skeletal composition. Thomason mixes her own paints, which keeps her especially attuned to and in control of her colors. It’s a laborious process, one in which the exertions of her body can’t help but influence the viewer’s experience of looking at her work. In a painting like Shell (2024-2025), Thomason’s alchemy is transferred to linen. The metronomic, silver-hued arabesques of built-up material expand across the canvas like flowing tidewaters, even as her insistent, cross-hatched scoring marks unify the composition. The painting’s tactile surface, evoking Thomason’s physical efforts, does suggest the exterior of a seashell. One can’t help but recall Botticelli’s late fifteenth-century Renaissance masterpiece, The Birth of Venus (ca. 1485), which depicts the goddess emerging from a decadent scallop shell.

A number of the paintings in Venus are of a much more considerable size than in previous bodies of work. This shift, to a human scale or even larger, heightens the impact of the embedded bodily traces. The schematics of her canvases are transposed from original drawings on a 1:1 scale. Mandorla (Jay), Fire (Ana), and Flag (Dara) are representative of this evolution. The three works (all

Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, ca. 1485, Tempera on canvas, 68 x 110 (172.5 x 278.5 cm). Gallerie degli Uffizi.

dated 2024-2025) unfold as a narrative, with the paintings increasing in size as they are “read” from left to right. Each of the distinctive titles alludes to both a graphic element of the individual painting and an earlier-generation female artist whose works Thomason regards as touchstones for her own artwork (in these cases, Jay DeFeo, Ana Mendieta, and Dara Birnbaum, respectively). It is a way, she says of “creating a feminist scaffolding to continue exploring the complex relationships between the body, landscape, materiality, and ways in which it can be mediated through abstract painting.”2 The paintings are simultaneously bold and vulnerable. Though not a triptych, ideas and forms seem to breach the limits of the canvas edge, each one spilling into the next, and eventually arriving at Flag (Dara) which arrives in a continuum of which she is a part. Though the paintings are abstract, nebulous forms proceed across the three so that the loose curves of Mandorla (Jay) become firmer shapes in the central canvas, Fire (Ana). Finally, elements that are almost recognizable as breasts, eyes, bellies, a pelvis, and a central, supportive spine emerge in Flag (Dara). This progression can be understood as a kind of layering, albeit of a kind that exists outside of linearity, much like the concentric arcs of Thomason’s imagined idea of time that allow her to bounce nimbly across years and through eons.

Circular time accommodates rhythm and pattern, and it decentralizes the contemporary, Western preoccupation with quantification. To become absorbed in a work of art, to truly get lost in it, the beholder is best served by abandoning the intrusive demands of linear time: I only have ten minutes. This needs to be done by the end of the day. I’m running out of time. Thomason’s work is an invitation for us to reimagine this mindset; if time is, indeed, an infinitely repeating resource, it will never truly “run out.” Perhaps is this nowhere more evident than in Venus (Map) (2024-2025), the largest of Thomason’s works. Curves and convexities abound in this painting composed on two canvases. One form approaches a human figure only to dissolve before the eyes. Loops in vibrant marmalade orange (one of Thomason’s signature colors) are overlaid across a complex topography. Based on the limited imagery humankind has managed to acquire from Venus, its terrain appears mountainous and rocky, craggy and volcanic. Thomason’s strata of mineral

2 Author’s conversation with the artist, January 28, 2025.

elements echo this partly imagined landscape. But the gestural brushstrokes are also tender and encompassing, infused with a palpable life force. In her unequaled poem “Antidotes to Fear of Death” the astronomer-poet Rebecca Elson imagined:

No outer space, just space,

The light of all the not yet stars

Drifting like a bright mist

And all of us, and everything

Already there

But unconstrained by form.

She adds:

And sometime it’s enough …

To walk across the cobble fields

Of our discarded skulls

Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis

Thinking: whatever left these husks

Flew off on bright wings.”3

Stardust and bone dust: who is to say that they are not one and the same, recycled between humanity and the cosmos in repeating, epochal rings that we don’t fully understand? Tracy Thomason’s work awakens us to the possibilities.

Jessica Holmes is a critic and writer based in the New York metro area, and an editor at the Brooklyn Rail. Her work appears there frequently, in addition to many other publications.

3 Rebecca Elson, “Antidotes to Fear of Death,” in A Responsibility to Awe, ed. Anne Berkeley, et. al. (Manchester: Carcanet Classics, 2001), 61.