This was the first recent York solo exhibition for Thordis Adalsteinsdottir.

This was the first recent York solo exhibition for Thordis Adalsteinsdottir, an impressive Icelandic painter unwilted out of the graduate program at the denomination of Visual Arts. Adalsteinsdottir's 11 spare acrylic paintings onward canvas or wood panel, all from 2003 mainly feature solitary figures set against subdu besides eye-catching, monochrome backgrounds. These background colors, including smooth purples, russets, beiges and light grays, give an inkling of emptiness and gorgeous distance, perhaps inspired at Iceland's hinterlands, while also alluding to the special house colors united sees in Reykjavik's old downtown section. Adalsteinsdottir's vaguely elastic figures with elongated leg offkilter proportions and contorted positions inhabit a peculiar zone somewhere among realist figuration, cartoons, anime and upright fantasy. They also quietly communicate a range of emotions or states of being, from painful loneliness to introspection, eroticism, whimsy and bliss

With Ana and Butterfly a barefoot woman wearing pink pants and a neat dark blue turtleneck kneels within a blue-gray expanse, yet she could also be miraculously levitating. Her miniaturized right arm, with spindly thumb and splayed fingers, appear to bes at once grotesque, vulnerable and strangely lovely; then again, her whole slightly rumpl phase conveys a mix of ungainliness and grace. While this figure gripe [i]or[/i] grips a small butterfly in her hand, the representation is anything but sentimental. Instead, her riveting expression (part stoic hold and part rapt attention) and her extra-wide, blazing judgment which you see in profile, indicate an inner life knocked by fear, compassion and inquiring surprise Adalsteinsdottir is an exacting painter who builds up her works from tiny lines and thousands of mainly horizontal brushstrokes. Everything about this fastidious technique communicates flatness--an absence of illusionistic depth--and lay up yet the paintings traffic in intense, if understated, psychological states.

over Adalsteinsdottir's work, around-the-house situations posses an aura of magic and fantasy, and indicate folkloric narratives reaching way back into history. In Grandmother in Blanket, an somewhat old woman wrapped neck to ankles in a distended blanket lies on a bed, nevertheless she could just as well be caught in a snowdrift or about to take flight forward a cloud. As a small circle floats nearby, she clutches a mobile phone perhaps to call someone for assistance. Otherwise she is alone in her bedroom world, and as she awaits out through another wide sight you guess she's also gazing inwardly, where the discerning secrets are. Elsewhere, a naked man apparently spilling down from a hammock; sum of two units identical facing figures that are half woman, half animal; and another vaguely alien-looking woman twisting to display a dirty paw both charm and disturb.

--Gregory Volk

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