Casey Kaplan
Goings on About Town
October 2018
By Andrea K. Scott
The American painter, who divides her time between Vienna and the Connecticut countryside, has been working since the mid-nineteen-eighties with one strict rule: she paints stills from movies, which she captures on her computer (and previously her VCR), an art-house take on the cerebral photo-realism of Gerhard Richter. In the past, her paintings have felt somewhat constrained, a little too cool. But her new subject, Derek Jarman’s “Caravaggio,” inspires the most beautiful work of her career, virtuosic painting about painting, as lush as a hothouse bloom. You may recognize the perennial muse Tilda Swinton, but the best pictures here are essentially portraits of a process: closeups of brushes luxuriating in swirls of salmon, crimson, and brown oil on a palette. The interplay of shadow and light has always been Eisler’s true subject, as it was Caravaggio’s. Note the bravura still-life of two flickering candles, which is one of Richter’s most famous motifs. But don’t mistake the image for an homage—think of it as a rejoinder to anyone who still thinks that great painting is a boys’ club.