Artist Taliah Lempert takes this paradigm further. Her subject matter is the journey. It is in actual fact a resting repository of many journeys. A mechanical, mobile memorial to the mortal.She paints bikes. And takes a line for a ride.
Yet her images pass way beyond the painterly prose of mere depiction. They are suffused with a paradoxical stillness. The elegant neck of a headset. The curves and arches of a frame. The organic sweep of the drops. All dormant features of a kinetic creature. Lempert states herself that in her process 'Art is like writing'. Which in turn is the silent record of speech, captured within Lempert's work as the poetic sympathy between an object and the empty spaces described by its form. Her work beautifully embraces the Henri Matisse maxim '“I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.”Bicycle art is not new. Back in Klee's time Marcel Duchamp produced the first ever readymade - Bicycle Wheel. And down the line we see works like Rauschenburg's Bicycle. This humble mechanical device inspired many a creative mind. Yet Lempert's work does not seem to belong to this celebration of the machine, as perhaps the more monolithic mechanical works of Eduardo Paolozzi do. Moreso we witness a delicacy, a soft touch, an anatomical incarnation. And in setting her subjects against a neutral, flat background one brings to mind the thoroughbred paintings of George Stubbs - Mares and Foals without a background (1762) or Whistlejacket. So her works are not just simple records, they are celebrations, they are reverential idolism. Which isn't a bad thing.
Lempert's paintings focus a certain tension. Of the transient at rest. It is a living, breathing thing - the sometime cropped compositions of a cherished road bike, for instance, reminiscent of Georgia O'Keeffe's Calla Lily Turned Away (1923). The varied surfaces - be it petal or pedal, elevate the subject, finding a new language for the everyday. “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for,” said Georgia O'Keeffe. We find Lempert's noble compositions adhere to this way of thinking. She elevates the bicycle into an ecological symbol. And stepping back from the canvas, we can savour the art of the everyday. Warhol gave us Campbell's Soup. Lempert gives us Colnago or Atala.Whether it is oil on canvas, silk screen on paper, or simply pencil marks, at the heart of her compositions sits a certain esoteric charm - a gloriously defused narcissism. There are names and numbers. But still a certain autonomy. Her works are cloaked portraiture. As we are what we eat, so too, perhaps, what we ride.
From New York Academy of Art to her third-floor loft at the foot of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg Bridge, Taliah Lempert has travelled the line of her artistic forebears, and arrived at a special place. We think this line will ride on.
