One Piece Worth Seeing

Sarah Slappey, Squeeze, 2018

Sarah Slappey, Squeeze, 2018, oil on canvas, 50.8 x 50.8 cm

People say this about musicians all the time: I only like the early stuff. It’s often annoying - a way of saying, I was there before you, before the thing became too clean, too successful. That isn’t what I mean about Sarah Slappey. Her recent paintings are extraordinary: stranger, sharper, more deliberate, and increasingly confident in their own weird erotic logic. The paintings are big, slick and commanding, with bodies, hands, pearls, pins and limbs pressed into a much more emphatic pictorial machinery. They look like Slappey with the volume turned up.

Still, I have spent a lot of time with Squeeze, and there is something about this 2018 moment that I find hard to let go of. It comes from the period around Night Feeding, Slappey’s 2018 New York solo debut at Crush Curatorial. At that point, the language that would become recognisably hers was coming into focus: the long fingers, detached limbs, fleshy botanical forms, strange touch and bodily ambiguity. Squeeze is 20 x 20 inches, a small painting, but it contains a world.

The painting is mostly green, grey and yellow, with small areas of warm pinkish light. It looks, at first, like a dark thicket. Then fingers appear. Or things pretending to be fingers. They sprout, reach, press and fold into one another. The body is there, but not as a body. It has been distributed through the painting in parts: touch without personhood, flesh without portrait, intimacy without the reassurance of a full figure.

Slappey has said that she uses detached limbs as a way to talk about “the body, rather than a body”, and that disfigured limbs reduce the distance between viewer and painted figure because the phantom limb might belong to no one, something unknown, or even the viewer. That is exactly what happens here. There is no stable person to look at. No face to organise your response. No nude reclining politely under the old art-historical contract. Just touching, pressing, probing, sprouting.

What I like especially about Squeeze is that it still seems situated. Not realistically, not in any sensible room or landscape, but spatially. There is a place in there. A damp, theatrical, underlit place. The fleshy leaves emerge from a dark environment, as if they are growing in it or being caught by it. Later Slappey paintings often become more graphic, more compressed, more assertively frontal. They do not need the same illusionistic murk. They make their own space out of bodies, colour and pressure.

I understand that move. It’s a good move. Plenty of painters I admire have found ways to remove the drama from represented space and put it into the surface itself. Ivy Haldeman does it with those slippery hot-dog bodies. Ellen Berkenblit does it with images that feel staged and flattened at once. Things can happen in a painting without needing a room for them to happen in.

Still, Squeeze has the pleasure of the earlier in-between state. It hasn’t quite given up the world. The forms are not floating symbols yet. They are still half-hidden in a place.

That place matters. The ArtMaze interview from 2018 describes Slappey’s paintings as “jungles of feet and hands”, with limbs twisting like vines, and notes the harsh, almost cinematic lighting. In Squeeze, the painting behaves like a small horror film in which nothing actually happens except the gradual discovery that everything is touching everything else.

The title is good too. Squeeze sounds blunt and physical. It could be affectionate, comic, sexual, threatening, childish. A squeeze of the hand, a squeeze through a gap, a squeeze too hard. Slappey’s work often sits exactly on that line between caress and grip. In the Soft Grip text, I described her painting as caught between comfort and constraint, between touch as nurturing and touch as controlling. Looking again at this work, that still seems right, but the painting itself is less neat than the sentence.

The tendrils are not simply doing something to someone. They are also being absorbed by the image. The central pale form looks swollen and soft, but the fingers around it are not easy to read as either tender or violent. Everything is too close. The painting does not give you the clean moral pleasure of identifying harm from the outside. It puts you in the sensation.

That is where Slappey’s paintings are strongest. They are not illustrations of female embodiment or clever reversals of the nude. They are paintings about what it feels like to have a body that is never only yours: touched, watched, imagined, desired, decorated, injured, hidden, made strange.

Squeeze is less polished than some of the later work, and I think that helps it. It has a looseness - the paint is smoky, rubbed, almost fugitive. The forms are less sealed. There is still air between them, even if it is damp air. The shadows do real work. They don’t just dramatise the image; they give it uncertainty. This is why I don’t think of Squeeze as minor because it is small, or transitional because it comes early. It is a painting made at the moment when Slappey’s vocabulary had arrived but had not yet hardened into its most recognisable form. The limbs are there. The touch is there. The queasy beauty is there. The sinister sweetness is there. But so is the atmosphere.

It is a strange little painting. Not loud, not obvious, not trying to be the definitive Slappey. Just a cluster of pale fingers and swollen forms in the dark, working out how much pressure a painting can apply before pleasure becomes something else.