The solo exhibition „Le moment favorable“, which has its opening on March 11th 2023 at gallery twenty-six, is going to showcase new paintings by Alice Ella.
„Le moment favorable“, the right, crucial, or opportune moment permits, unveils, enables…
Ella‘s works of art captivate due to and excel through their motivic immediacy, with a considerable amount of their appeal lying in their typical aesthetics, the Alice Ella signature style: vigorous coloring, rich in contrast, highly stylized silhouettes, effusive postures, iconic attributes, the memorable stylistic idiom somewhere between art deco, pop art and instagram-aesthetics, the recurring two central motifs hat and mouth.
By dint of their interplay and synergy the depicted faces are turned into ciphers – enigmatic, utterly complex, highly charged symbols.
At first glace the paintings of this selection seem appreciably reminiscent of Kiki Kogelnik‘s “Women Paintings“ from the 1970s, such as “Women‘s lib“ (1971), for stylistically as well as in form and content there striking similarities appear, ranging from the frontality and flatness of the image composition to the large sunglasses and the conspicuous headgear.
As Kogelnik‘s artistic decisions are indubitably deeply rooted in the context of a critical, even partly aggressive, feminist approach, those pieces of work are to be primarily legible as criticism of the one-dimensional perspective that has been shaping the rendering of and the role assignment to women, whereas Alice Ella‘s typical, subtle sense of humor turned the mere evocation of this art-historical sphere of reference into an exciting, utterly pleasurable vexatious game for beholders to relish.
Arising from the immediacy, the directness of the meeting between the depicted persons and the beholders, kairos the magic of a proper or opportune time for action makes itself noticeably felt – that unique moment, that has the potential to turn hues into cues -„Le moment favorable“…
