NEW YORK, NY.- Robert Blumenthal Gallery presents Day Gazer, Jessie Edelman’s first solo show with the gallery. Edelman’s Day Gazer series are richly-colored seascapes, each featuring female figures in the foreground. In these lush frame-within-a-frame compositions, the central figure reconstructs the act of looking. Facing away from the viewer, these women gaze ponderously into both the second frame and the seascapes before us.

If Cézanne’s The Bather (1885) inaugurated modern painting with its subject “stepping out” of the illusionistic space of the picture plane, today Edelman’s picture-within-a-picture renews this spatial tension through an oppositional relationship to attention, time, and screens. As Michelle Grabner notes in an essay accompanying the exhibition, Edelman “examines the suspension of time as represented by figures gazing away from the space in which they are pictorially situated. Grabner continues: “the subject of Edelman’s paintings is foremost the subject of attention and the slowing down of time.” Where Cézanne’s Bather seems to step out of the canvas, Edelman’s paintings instead suggest a step in, perhaps confronting the infinite.

Edelman’s series comes at a time when the discourse around painting is shifting. In the face of ubiquitous networked experiences, painting is re-emerging as a radical act. While alluding to the visual language of French Impressionists and the mid-twentieth-century color field and color theory artists such as Mark Rothko and Josef Albers, Edelman’s paintings respond to the impulses that now weigh on seeing. Grabner states: “Whether or not Edelman’s women are looking at a landscape or into a landscape, at a picture of a landscape or a digital projection, they are actively making sense of the world in their own heads, each figure engaged in the ethics of attention.” The considered fixations depicted by Edelman’s women reflect back on the viewer. For Grabner they are “declarations of discipline”—in rapt attention or distracted glance, today we approach painting on new terms, captured here by the central subject’s ambiguous relationship to the painting’s visual field.

Jessie Edelman is a New York-based artist born in 1986. She received her MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art in 2013. In 2016 her work will be featured in an exhibition at The Suburban, Michelle Grabner’s independently-run artist space in Oak Park, IL.