Nathalie Vogel, 1980 | The liquid women

Most of the work from Vogel exhibited here pertains to undines: "liquid women", bewitching and tragic.

Several paintings deal more specifically with a quintessential theme of romantic symbolism, the drowning Ophelia.

Vogel's postmodern reexamination of the opheliac disappearance introduces subtle and complex nuances in the representation of feminity: Ophelia doesn't drown, she withdraws from us.

This feminity with an attitude is very different from the symbolist's victimized staging of feminity.

Two antithetical avix cross each other to revisit the undine semiotic space.

On a first dichotomy, the overexposed body contrasts with the thick darkness of the sleeping waters.

On a second one, more complex, the ostentatious disclosure of nudity clashes with the dismissive looks of the women.

Contrived stances and cold indifference work in two conflicting and irreconcilable directions.

The painter's "manner" further emphasizes this duality.

The meticulous execution, lavishly exposing the corporal envelop in utmost details, is balanced by the subtle body language of emotions, all expressed by minute nuances of posture, looks and pouts.

As a result, this whole sphere of antithetical feelings renews from top to bottom the foundation of the symbolist universe.

Symbolists staged the sublime of the missing Ophelia, where Vogel experiments with the oxymoron of her withdrawal and glaring presence.

Nathalie Vogel: "Sometimes when I look at a corner of a room, or corner of the city sky, it seems like the different elements want to collide with each other.

It happens pretty randomly, somehow there are unexpected moments when I am compelled to imagine a colliding and rearrangement of the different pieces I see, be it a chair and a wall corner, with a pipe and a floor, or in the "Mad Rocks" painting where rocks became huge and went fighting for space in the painting, with water, and the boat.

I am mostly concerned with how a picture functions like in its composition, color, line, space, etc., the formal aspects of painting.

I’ve been drawing and painting since I was born, learning from my grandparents who were both painters, then pursued a classical training in Paris, and was a photorealist painter for years.

Currently I am toying with the way that the forms of two divers resist the activity of diving: they each belong to a different world but dive together into the water, and into the unknown.

I might keep that diving theme for other paintings and continue to break up the spaces in modules, and rearrange them in a way that is satisfying, playing with many textures, overlapping spaces, and making it all a bit chaotic".

With work in numerous private collections across North America, Vogel has won honors like the Best in Show prize for the Mid Atlantic New Painting Exhibition in 2009 and selection in the New Directions 2009, National Juried Contemporary Art Exhibition.