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Susan Norrie's second solo exhibition in New York comprises objects and paintings in installation. As the title suggests, vis-à-vis is an exhibition in which arguments are made discreetly, almost as asides. Where Norrie's earlier work based many of its arguments on the intelligibility of a sumptuous superficiality, this work instead embeds technical virtuosity below a surface of serigraphic marks, photographically sourced images, historical references and artisan-crafted models. In vis-à-vis Norrie refuses the painterly bravura for which she is perhaps best known, rendering paint through screens both actual and metaphorical. This is not to deny the installation's highly refined physical presence so much as to emphasise its rebus-like quality.
In the first of two rooms, a suite of vertical panels bears an inscription declaring 'elegance of taste ... a proper object of rational pursuit' decorously multiplied to the brink of illegibility. Opposite is a rendering of Chardin's Spinning Top, materially much reduced from the richly wrought original, a phantom version, its grazed grey-green screenprinted surface broken only by the elaborate modeling of the top itself. It is the only element painted with the painterly finesse often associated with Norrie, as if to show more would topple that fragile balance between beauty (that most taboo of words) and overkill. What is left to the viewer is a notion of poise, elegance and restraint which then turns in upon itself, just as the Chardin turned critically in upon the social indolence for which the original is said to be an allegory. In Norrie's version of the Spinning Top the boy watching is flattened into a shallow picture plane, his face a pallid mask, his soft glowing cheeks so perfectly articulated as to