JULIE MEHRETU (B. 1970)

A majestic painting brimming with the inscrutable yet mesmerizing mark-making for which she is best known, Julie Mehretu’s Fever Graph (Algorithm for Serendipity) is nothing short of incredible, a fever dream of the wondrous capacity for experimentation and renewal that exists in contemporary painting today.

A panoramic work evoking a fairy tale landscape that’s marked by areas of inky blurs and ghostly lines, the present work presents a fictional realm whose very depiction defies legibility and interpretation. Scattered bits of letters and words coexist alongside vector lines forming “x”-marks and crosses, while a pale yellow moon presides over a dreamy mountain-scape that seems to melt into oblivion. Faintly discernible beneath the chaotic markings of its surface imagery lies the urban plans for Tahrir Square, the symbolic and literal site of the 2011 uprisings in Cairo, part of what became known as the Arab Spring. Born in Addis Ababa in 1970, Mehretu was personally impacted by the geopolitical turbulence in North Africa, and these important paintings have come to symbolize an imagined realm where the capacity for change, renewal and resilience is infinitely possible. As such, they continue Mehretu’s ongoing pursuit of the symbolic and expressive capacity of abstract painting to symbolize larger human emotions and themes.

Painted in 2013, Fever Graph (Algorithm for Serendipity) is a monumental painting inflected with beautiful passages of luminous color and the artist’s signature mark-making. The artist draws the eye deep into the recessional space of the painting by positioning two perspectival lines along the lower edge that direct the eye into the center of the canvas, where most of the pictorial activity is located. In the upper register, smoky gray marks seem to delineate a series of faraway mountain peaks, which at times appear to be given three-dimensional modeling and depth by pale washes of luminous color. Along the right edge, a two-story house with a gabled roof seems to be nestled into the landscape, while nearby a series of telephone poles recede into the distance. Mehretu’s work is often deliberately inscrutable, and it is not surprising to find that her imagery flickers back and forth between all-out abstraction and hints of realism.

Drawing from a rich visual tradition inspired by both Eastern and Western cultures, Julie Mehretu’s visual inspiration has included architectural blueprints, Baroque engravings, Japanese calligraphy, comic book motifs and graffiti. With the improvisatory flair of a jazz musician, Mehretu riffs off these diverse sources to create beautiful and seductive large-scale paintings that lure the viewer in with their mind-boggling array of countless, swirling marks. As part of her research, the artist often searches for source material online, and she became increasingly interested in search engine algorithms around the time that the present work was created. In fact, Fever Graph (Algorithm for Serendipity) takes its name from these search engine algorithms, particularly the technology’s ability to intuit and predict human behavior.

This important cycle of paintings is also marked by an expressive use of color and a freer, more gestural style of mark-making, which critics were quick to point out, when the paintings debuted at Marian Goodman Gallery in May of 2013. “The most stirring moments in this show still rely on her orchestrations of massive canvases," the art critic Grant Klarich Johnson declared. "These works also open up a more expressive, romantic relationship to color. [...] In works like Fever Graph (Algorithm for Serendipity)...color becomes a vehicle for emotions strange, jubilant and foreboding” (G. K. Johnson, “Julie Mehretu: Liminal Squared,” The Brooklyn Rail, July 19, 2013, online).

In Fever Graph (Algorithm for Serendipity) and the related painting Cairo (2013; The Broad, Los Angeles), the artist has incorporated architectural renderings of Cairo’s Tahrir Square to reference the populist uprisings of the first months of 2011. This important body of work speaks specifically to the civic and bureaucratic ineptitude of the Hosni Mubarak regime; by underpinning her paintings with the faint schematic renderings of the buildings in Tahrir Square, Mehretu draws attention to the outsized bureaucratic role of Mubarak’s government and its chronic inefficiency. Her epic four-part painting Mogamma (first exhibited at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, in 2012) was inspired by the 14-story bureaucratic monolith of the same name, which presides over Tahrir Square. In the present painting and throughout the series, Mehretu was able to “translate the violent elements of revolt into a powerful visual analogue” (T.J. Demos, “Painting and Uprising: Julie Mehretu's Third Space,” in Julie Mehretu: Liminal Space, exh. cat., White Cube, London, 2013, p. 55).

Also present in this body of work was a particular new kind of mark that found its way into Mehretu's work around this time. Particularly in the upper register and along the periphery, Mehretu depicted a kind of smudged mark that is a cross between an emphatic gesture and all-out erasure. These faint marks linger like the silent “ghosts” of previous marks, almost like the faded cyphers on a stone tablet that has faded over time to become an illegible palimpsest. Mehretu was also interested in the idea of in-between spaces, calling her 2013 exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery “Liminal Squared." In her marks which are not fully marks but also not quite erased, she has found a half-way “liminal” entity that is both things at once. So, too, do her paintings exist as the “in-between” spaces where opposing forces can coexist side by side.