I have not thought about nights out for quite some time. Once in my early twenties, standing and looking at the New York Times office at the corner of 8th Avenue and 40th Street, I decided to stop drinking. But I have been thinking about the cacophony of youth lately after visiting Emily Olszewski’s exhibition. At the Hingetown location of the Abattoir Gallery, the artist presents seven paintings with scenes full of intimacy and personal pleasures. Olszewski highlights women in different situations, creating ambiguous mysteries for the viewer.
Fully blatant, Olszewski’s paintings produce frisson with which you jump between the zippy and humorous stories, trying to complete them in your head. Within their coterie, the figures are placed in various interior or exterior environments. In the painting “We Know All the Shortcuts” (2024), the artist portrays three women in the middle of the footpath. The central placement of the figures provides a moment of tension between the past and the future. We do not know where they are going or where they are coming from. Hence, it poses the question as to what happened before or after the scene took place. This invites speculation to complete the story and trigger our imagination.
While looking around the surfaces in search of answers to the mysteries, we can notice how strong the sense of composition and balance is in the work of Olszewski. Furthermore, the artist devotes her attention to artificial light. Many tones of green, blue, red, violet and fuchsia are involved in these configurations. And this fact brings psychological twists to the narratives. The portrayed individuals do not need approval for their actions. Never looking at each other directly, the figures live together in those moments unashamedly. This move also reduces our judgmental opinions of what the characters do.
I saw the work being in dialogue with fête galante paintings, which featured figures in dresses or costumes in parkland settings in the eighteenth century. Nicolas Lancret’s work reflected on contemporary society, and humor was one of the defining characteristics of his work. Likewise, all paintings of Olszewski have humorous titles that produce disarming intensity to the playful engagement of the scenes. Some of the views invoke well-known moments. If you’re from Northeast Ohio, you recognize Tim Misny’s face or the Cleveland skyline in the painting “Get Us While We’re Hot!!” (2024). In other work, specific jewelry, clothes and drinks highlight our contemporary life. There is no such thing yet, but if there can be a contemporary version of fête galante, Emily Olszewski will lead the movement.
The artist celebrates the situations by intensifying what is always there—friends and memories. The oddity and unorthodoxy of each painting not only allow you to see the environments but also to feel them. What I am suggesting, then, is that looking at Olszewski’s work is more complicated than simply seeing the boisterous landscape of youth. The work opens up a double scrim. There, on one side, they are personal narratives. But on the other side, it facilitates something universal for all of us. The paintings impose a sort of cultural membrane on the border of which we move between here and there, present and past. And on that edge is where the spirit of an entire milieu of youth could be disclosed.
New paintings by Emily Olszewski are on view at Abattoir Gallery at The Quarter, 2615 Detroit Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio, through March 15, 2025.
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