Rebecca Purdum’s Art Beyond Language

HUDSON, New York — If your first thoughts about Rebecca Purdum’s constantly fluctuating abstract paintings are what they remind you of — for instance, a mowed hayfield in winter seen beneath a moody gray sky — you would not necessarily be wrong. You would, however, miss the deeper pleasure of not being able to pin them down. This is the conundrum these works present; they may resemble aspects of the natural world but they allude to an experience beyond language. They thwart that yearning to claim ownership by naming, which we all experience, but which can prevent us from seeing and feeling sensorially. The artist’s refusal to create discursive paintings is radical.

Each work in the exhibition Rebecca Purdum: 11 Paintings at Pamela Salisbury Gallery is its own world. Purdum does not make art serially. Using all the paint she has for each piece, she applies it to a canvas or linen surface with her hands and later scrapes it down with a palette knife. Every painting is an opaque diary of addition and subtraction, documenting a cycle of covering and uncovering. Though traces of earlier marks remain, Purdum leaves no history of what path she took to reach her destination. Her paintings are literally and metaphorically self-effacing.  

In “Inside, Outside” (2024), she covers the surface with a dark terre verte pigment (also known as “green earth”). The process of building up and scraping down is inimitable. The painting’s darkest, densest area reads as both an oval and an opening, a pit that cannot be entered. A lighter, barely legible form is visible in the center. What does its presence signify? Its resistance to definition underscores the gap between experience and language. 

In “January” (2025) and “Harbor” (2024), paint and woven linen surface have become one, a record of scraping away and erosion. In the latter, the densest area floats near the top, a dark maroon cloud. Even as it may provoke a sense of weariness, a few indecipherable white marks stir other feelings. What are we to make of these marks within this darkness? Or that this area seems to float? How do we interpret the green marks in “January” that appear to be both part of the abraded surface and separate from it?  

As with the maroon cloud, no matter how hard we try, we cannot peer deeper into the surface. The desire to see deeper recognizes the infinitesimal existence of the individual. Is the “Harbor” in which we seek an impossible refuge a sense of infinity? Purdum’s paintings always make me hyper-conscious of my inescapable solitariness, at once sad and wondrous. They remind me of the opening line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The First Elegy”: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels’/Orders?”

Purdum juxtaposes that longing with an awareness of fleeting phenomenon: the dense surface of the maroon cloud and its flickering, changing, multicolored surroundings. She knows that our lives are comprised of the immediate world of sight and touch and of immeasurable reality, and does not want to lose her consciousness of either. What persists is time, and the endless change that it brings consumes everything. These paintings turn us inward, nudge us toward our inchoate feelings, as their surfaces reveal time’s abrasive effects. In this regard, they distinguish themselves from the abstract color fields of Rothko and Reinhardt, whose titles reflect the timeless, however tragic. 

Like these two artists, Purdum’s paintings are impossible to fully capture photographically, even in our precise digital age. The light slowly yielded by the changing surface diffuses as quickly as we see it, leaving us unsure of what we are looking at, and where to concentrate our attention. In wrestling with formlessness, she devotes herself to a kind of abstraction rare in today’s art world. 

Rebecca Purdum: 11 Paintings continues at Pamela Salisbury Gallery (362 1/2 Warren Street, Hudson, New York) through April 6. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.