An Introduction to the Works of S.L.

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32 first encountered the work of s.l. in a group show at the Humboldt Gallery. S.L.’s three unframed paintings —luminous clouds against a bleak sky—hung side by side in an otherwise empty room, tucked away from the gallery’s main hall. They produced the effect of a portal opening from concrete to nature, from substance to air. All three paintings were unsigned, and there was no mention of the artist’s name anywhere in the room, even though other works in the show were identified. I wrote to the curator the following day and received some basic information about the painter; I began following her work, striving to adjust my vision to the demands of her art. It would be years before I felt confident enough to write this essay, to examine certain aspects of her elusive technique. fiction An Introduction to the Works of S.L. Ayşegül Savaş I An Introduction to the Works of S.L. | 33 my first contact with s.l. was as a guest editor for the winter issue of Dark and Moon; I wrote her to ask about using one of her pieces on the cover; the paintings I’d seen at the gallery some years before might work well, I suggested. S.L. asked what texts we would publish in the issue. I hadn’t told her that the theme was “Lost,” but upon reading the pieces I shared with her, she wrote to say that she did not think the cloud paintings were suitable, because she considered the contents of the journal “more labyrinth than dome.” She proposed a charcoal drawing of a forest path, which may also have been a large serpent, that immediately struck me as the right choice; the pieces in the issue, as she pointed out, were indeed labyrinthine. S.L.’s sensitivity to text is apparent in much of her earlier work, in particular her series Hawthorn, chronicling the meeting between a woman and six animals—fox, bear, wolf, seal, eagle, snake— inside a circular structure held up by pillars. The works are narrative in composition, both in the story they tell and the one they withhold: How did the creatures arrive there? What language do the woman and animals speak? They are also visually textual in their dense and sinewy surfaces—the echoing swirls, hatches, and strokes—as if S.L. has invented her own system of writing, a personal code that is at once decipherable and opaque, and might open up to a viewer with the correct focus. Among S.L.’s influences are the writings of the early-­ twentieth-­ century Latvian parapsychologist Konstantı̄ns Raudive, whose life’s work was to capture voices of the dead in electronic recordings . Found in recordings of ocean waves, untuned radios, or microphone static, these voices, Raudive observed, “speak very rapidly, in a mixture of languages, sometimes as many as five or six in one sentence,” and “in a definite rhythm, which seems forced on them.” The sole work of the scientist, according to him, was to give sound to the inaudible. This description resonates with S.L.’s art as well, where a mass of minute organic forms often transforms into human shapes. Within the silver-­ point series Kosmos is tree bark that has grown 34 | Ayşegül Savaş eyes, or the moss of a forest floor teeming with hands and feet. Everything is compressed, stuttering, making its way to us with immense effort, like the muffled voices of the ocean recordings. Viewers cannot be sure if what they see is indeed there, or a product of their imagination: is that the round, swollen shape of a breast? Is that a torso, dripping a luminescent saffron sheath? Several critics point to a lack of intention and rigor in S.L.’s art, echoing a common critique of parapsychological studies that the human forms and voices they unearth are simply the product of the mind making familiar outlines of what it perceives. We are constantly searching for something to hold on to, the critics surmise; in the absence of meaning, we shape patterns out of pure chaos. As such, S.L...