Provenance: Silverlens

ABOUT THE WORK

Notable for her thick, rhapsodic impasto, in which the plasticity of paint registers the artist’s gesture, Eileen Navas has consistently pursued this painterly style in depicting a variety of subject matter — from the choppy waves of the sea to, in the case of this work, a snapshot of a bedroom. Here, the pleats and folds of the sheet (too large for the bed it covers) seem energetic, as though someone has just risen up and left in a rush. Seen from an oblique angle, the bed appears to be out of place in the room it occupies, emphasizing a feeling of being closed in, of claustrophobia. The walls and floor are painted in the same manner as the bed’s, but the looseness of the stroke’s points not only to a different material but absorption of light. The darkened bed is the gravitational center that holds the space around it, which makes this powerful painting not merely a depiction of domesticity, but the assertive force of objects animated by use.