Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Corinne Wasmuht
German; 21st-century
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
79%
Llanganuco Falls. 2008. Oil on panels
Wasmuht’s painting — designed through digital means but done entirely in oils — might have come off similarly had it been made by a 1912 Picasso who’d just been given a laptop. Cubistically, it seems to be trying to capture every visual aspect of its titular falls. Rather than edging towards the picture plane, however, the whole scene bursts back from it, compelled by the realistic and intensely perspectival road in the foreground. If the painting’s spring colors and luminosity occasionally lapse into prettiness, it’s a prettiness justified by Wasmuht’s sense of arrangement. Every one of the painting’s components simultaneously asserts itself as a discrete formal unit and corresponds, mostly by means of color and placement, to some element of the road at bottom. The result is a fractured flatness to seven eighths of the painting which serves confusingly to emphasize the intense recession into space of the other eighth. (2022)