ZURICH.- Galerie Eva Presenhuber announced an online viewing room of Amy Feldman’s first Zurich exhibition Goodnight Light, which is on view until November 26, 2022. Echoing Feldman’s exhibition Mothercolor last year at the gallery’s New York space, the variously-scaled gray paintings highlighting her unique visual language contain silkscreen elements, as well as the artist’s own fingerprint touches with thick paint. This novel addition of tactility, an urgent act of the hand, signals the artist’s duello with the physical and formal aspects of abstract painting.

The surfaces of Feldman’s recent works are enlarged and exaggerated facsimiles of raw canvas over pristine gray fields. In this presentation, Feldman introduces a moiré effect within her printed fields. The moiré that appears as another new direction furthers Feldman’s relationship with tonalities as well as her conversation with the viewer. Imbuing the paintings with a reverberating—almost mercurial—finish, this coloring on the surfaces signals an exploration of both light rays and light’s absence. “On first inspection, the viewer might not initially notice the printed ground and assume my paintings have rough surfaces,” Feldman says. “The illusion becomes clear when the work is examined up close. I am excited by this moment, the viewer’s suspension of disbelief, when they acknowledge their own capability to accept fiction as fact.” The artist attributes this interaction to “a moment of instability when the notion of truth feels subjective—feels gray.”

In defiance of the gradual disappearance of the artist’s hand in art-making, Feldman delves deeper into the tactility of painting, particularly of the canvas medium. Multiple passes of silkscreen ink enfold various textures of the raw canvas and transfer their woven physicality onto grey fields. While the process remains a partially enigmatic element for the eye, the bodily presence of the canvas is never compromised, even elevated as an integral part of the finished work. The introduction of finger paint contributes to such a reminder of the materiality in painting. Feldman’s fingerprint—a form of identity, character, heat, and authorship—salutes the trajectory of art-making as far back as the cave paintings marked with fingertips.