Anna Collevecchio: “The Door Is Right There”
- Eye Level
- Aug 18
- 6 min read
Of suns, seconds, squiggles, kundalini rising, and what we do with all of that radiance.
In winter 2015, On Kawara landed, gracefully, at the Guggenheim. For the next few months, the walls of the main rotunda were dedicated to Kawara’s life work: intensely rendered monochromatic paintings of the date, every day, every year, for almost fifty years. Sometimes the curator paired these with newspapers that also corresponded to the date. Sometimes, the act of painting the date, over and over, was left to speak for itself.
The show got good reviews. It was polarizing nonetheless. Many people I knew — people who ordinarily liked art shows at the Guggenheim — weren’t feeling it. It felt to them like an act more indicative of monomania than the personal expression they’d come to expect from a museum in New York City. But I loved it. My arguments on behalf of Kawara’s exhibition were, for me, without really knowing it, my first indication that I had something I wanted to say to people about visual art. As an old rocker, I recognized Kawara’s art practice as a kind of performance. It was a show that never ends, played to an undefined audience but directed outward and toward the rest of a world, like the sound of a guitarist who loudly humps on the same chord for measure after measure.
Why would a musician do that? Usually, it’s because something is eating at him. Rather than get consumed by it, he turns it around and makes his signal a manifestation of that anxiety. Kawara’s obsessive repetition of the date in painting after painting seemed to me to be a reasonable expression of the desire to count, and quantify, and put things into a sequence as a response to the chaos of being. The artist was doing something that we all do, in one way or another: he was staring down indeterminacy and trying to tame the untamable. By letting us in on his methods and performing them in front of us, he, quite bravely, I thought, exposed both the urgency of his search and the futility of it, too.
I thought of On Kawara at Anna Collevecchio’s show in the lobby gallery at 150 Bay Street. Collevecchio, a painter and something of a modern-day mystic, isn't ridden by the furies as ferociously as Kawara was. But she does do something that he might have: she counts her strokes.
The circular, hemispherical, and hexagonal paintings on display in “The Door Is Right There” are scored by thousands of vermicelli-thin lines, and the artist, mindful as she is, keeps track of every one. More than that, she reports the tally. On the side of a great, thick circular panel marked from top to bottom with little gold dashes that swim, stream, bend, and loop in whorls reminiscent of a human fingerprint (hers?), she’s recorded their number — sixteen-thousand three hundred and eight.
That’s not the only number she’s painted on the rim of her piece. Instead, like a prisoner tallying the days on a cell wall, she’s stopped to paint the number of strokes after each multiple of one hundred. She keeps this ledger in the same gold paint she uses to apply her mesmerizing strokes to the panel, and articulates the numerals as clearly, and with the same emphasis on uniformity, as Kawara did. An image emerges of a woman in her studio, by herself, chasing something across the surface of her painting in even steps, applying lines of the same length, dipping her brush, breathing, softly counting, reaching a round number, logging, painting, logging, more counting, more painting and more logging, until harmonic effulgence is achieved.
This is not meditation, nor is it prayer. It’s an artistic expression of an idea — one that begins deep in the body on the day we realize our heartbeats are numbered, and continues as we watch the slow sweep of the sun across the sky and the inexorable crawl of the hands across the clockface. Collevecchio tells us that each stroke on her circular panel takes half of a second to make. That means the golden lines aren’t just aesthetically pleasing. They also represent duration. Since we’re provided the final count by the artist on the side of the disc, and we know the speed with which she’s registering her marks, we’ve got enough variables in place to solve an equation. If we’d care to, we can figure out how long it took the artist to decorate the piece. The painting, then, isn’t merely an image. It’s a timepiece.
The text accompanying “The Door Is Right There” makes it sound like the most postmodern show imaginable. The artist makes reference to Eastern spirituality, the zodiac, popular physics and the block universe, Beatles lyrics, electromagnetics, and makes a visual comparison between the ten Sefirot of the Kabbalah and a game of hopscotch. In practice, it’s anything but. This is a highly coherent show about the anxiety of counting, and mark-making, in a finite lifetime.
There’s astrological significance to the sumptuous nine-panel piece on the gallery’s south wall in which eight golden orbs on richly colored square panels encircle a central panel. Each of the planets are given equal weight, and equal space, and an equal tidal pull on the viewer’s horoscope. But the entire assembly is brazenly, brilliantly heliocentric. Everything is attached to a magnetic sun — and the sun, as we all know, is the standard by which we measure our endless numbered days.
Through the reflective power of metallic paint, Anna Collevecchio makes her sun shine; through thousands of dashed lines, she makes it radiant; through judicious use of celestial shadow, she makes it part of the cosmic mystery. The artist shows a tanner’s reverence for the big ball of fire in the sky, and by matching it with a sweet, bright little moon, a Robin to its Batman, she cures its of its astral loneliness. Then she tethers the planets to the sun with thick, possessive gold lines, gold connoting value, all planetary bodies grasping hands in a protective oval, none more important than any other but all subordinate to the source of light.
It is meaningful that Collevecchio chooses to yoke her planetary oxen together so firmly, spaces them so precisely, and positions them so carefully. Here is a vision of a solar system that works: it’s organized, mutually beneficial, resonant and symmetrical, rather than the vast howling void that confronts us when we look to the night sky.
Wild wishes like these, I think, are at the heart of all true art projects that make counting, logging, and organizing a central feature. They’re reflections of the artist’s deepest desire: to live in a universe that makes sense. They also elaborate the practices and habits that we fall back on when it doesn’t.
On the western wall, right by the door, Collevecchio has mounted “Per Aspera Ad Samadhi,” a stack of seven hexagons that rise in a jagged but orderly line from the floor to eye level. Unlike the artist’s textured, layered depiction of the sun, there’s not much trace of overpainting. But each hex is an ejection of energy, shading, gold leaf, a puff of pigment from a Holi paint party or the Electric Daisy Carnival. For Collevechio, this is a depiction of the rise of the kundalini, the Hindu life force, through the seven chakras, or meditation points of the body. You don’t have to be a yogi of any path to see the roiling flame red of the hex closest to the bottom of the pile ebb into the cooler colors in the center to get the picture, or wonder why this volcanic spirit has been so strictly channelled by the painter, or notice that it resolves in a hexagon of pure white — transcendent, serene, empty, lawful neutral.
The ground floor gallery at 150 Bay Street is not a mystical place. The elevators in the back of the room announce it for what it is: the trafficked lobby of a building where art studios share space with corporate workers. Those artists ship and receive many packages, and they tend to bunch up near the door. Brown paper wrapping in the corners and gilt layers on the walls may prompt cognitive dissonance. Yet Collevecchio deserves credit for making a kind of temple out of this room. She’s done it not through planetary syzygy or harmonic convergence, but through an honest accounting of the means by which she deals with the challenges of existence. She’ll keep coloring, and counting, and theorizing, and recording, and stitching it all together with every little line she’s got.
(The 150 Bay Street lobby is, technically, open to the public from 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. on weekends. But there are so many people in and out of the building that you won’t have to wait long to get through the glass doors if you come to the corner of 1st and Bay at any other time of the week during business hours. You can also press your nose against the glass as you’re walking by. Don’t laugh — that was the original dream of the Powerhouse Arts District. We wanted a neighborhood where the art was right there on street level for passersby to apprehend. We’ve got Novado Gallery, we’ve got Jenny Nolan’s installation at Project 14C, and we’ve got this. Better than nothing, I say.)
