“All the Things We Cannot See”, Maya Gallery, Tel Aviv, Curator: Yaniv Shapira. (Photo credit: Lena Gomon and Yael Ilan)

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My gaze wanders across Linda Adams’ paintings. I try to grasp them, but they elude me. I follow her searching, exploring gaze— up, down, inward and outward—and just when I think I’ve caught up with it, it too slips away. One gaze chases another.

The works Entering and Leaving hang the new studio space Adams recently moved into. They depict the same door from both points of view. In Entering it is seen from the outside, in light tones, illuminated by natural light, surrounded by barred windows that seem to enclose it, yet it stands wide open, allowing a glimpse into the spacious area beyond. In Leaving the viewpoint is reversed. The same facade is depicted in dark tones that highlight, from the inside out, a bright light emanating from the doorway and windows.

Staircases also represent an important layer in Adams’ mapping of space. The enigmatic piece Stairwell Reflection sheds light on the studio environment, both as a tangible location and as an abstract realm of surfaces in gray, green, and ochre. The perspective is directed downward, and the right side of the staircase is stained by an elongated shadow. Is this a portrait of the artist as an absent presence?

A similar shadow appears in other works, and the downward gaze is repeated in Stairwell. The angular composition formed by the railing, wall, and floors is enhanced by shadow projections from the ceiling lamp and a square, black stain resembling a sinkhole of consciousness. In the painting Stairway to SoHo, the gaze is suddenly directed upward, revealing compositional relationships among the wooden railing, the staircase, and the arched barred window.

Adams confronts entrance with exit, interior with exterior, light with shadow, these reversals serve as a gateway to her pictorial world, reflecting dialectical tensions between the familiar and the alienated, the revealed and the hidden, between reality and imagination. When the familiar recedes toward the abstract, the architectural patterns can also be felt as a reflection of a state of consciousness.

Works from another series, All the Things We Cannot See (not shown in this exhibition), Sleeping Girl, Night Party, and Things That Go Bump in the Night, seem to emerge from a surrealistic realm of sleep and dreams. They depict imaginary creatures, birds, and plants that for Adams emerge as symbols of providence. “I try to be attentive to the atmosphere of the place as an expression of a hidden life.

I search for images that feel archetypal, that express the energy of the space,” she says, adding, “I imagine the studio at night and sense it has a life of its own.”

Indeed, in these paintings, the studio releases its austere expression, geometric forms, and muted color palette. It appears to come alive, yielding to boundless space and a sense of abandonment, and Adams returns to being the child who perceives that, in her dreams, reality is imagination, no less than imagination is reality.

Yaniv Shapira