Skip to main content

Hilarie Mais

Adam Geczy
Eyeline 88
The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...

The entry pieces to Hilarie Mais survey exhibition served as a coda for the rest. These were two works of characteristically irregular lattice, one poised on the ground, the other hanging on the wall. Dedicated to her late husband William Wright, they were titled reflection/feather (2016) and reflection/reach (2015), the lowercase suggesting diminutive fragility, the frayed ends of each work denoting incompleteness and discontinuity. Despite being devoted to a painful climax in Mais’s life, they were representative of her entire opus for the way in which they deployed the paradox of chaotic order. These works warned the viewer not to be deceived by the formal refinements of the works, or their ostensible mathematising. For lurking underneath what seemed an uncompromising rationalisation, is a world adrift, subject to innumerable alterations and perturbations. Mais’s artistic project is to tell us that it is only through the most systematic that the unfathomably abstract can be brought into view.

As Ludwig Wittgenstein gnomically announced earlier in his career: ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’. Among other things, this tells us that language is not a matrix laid over the world of feelings, images and things, rather language is incorporated in them, they cannot be set apart. Applied to Mais’s work, the call to order is not so much a way of disciplining a world, but rather a method by which to understand it; these are aesthetic maps that stand for the ways in which we configure the world. As in the work of Donald Judd, Mais seeks out what is basic and real, but in so doing exposes the irreducibility of reality. The empirical world is full of holes

Hilarie Mais, Cluster Ghost, 2016.

Hilarie Mais, Cluster Ghost, 2016.Synthetic polymer paint on wood. Images courtesy and © the artist. Photographs Jessica Maurer.

Hilarie Mais, reflection/feather,2016.

Hilarie Mais, reflection/feather,2016.Oil on wood, 240 x 112 x 4cm. Images courtesy and © the artist. Photographs Jessica Maurer.