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Elena Allen’s mountainscapes, oceanscapes, cityscapes, roadscapes are suffused with the light and vibrant colors of southern California where she has lived for 38 years, though they speak to insistent but suppressed memories and images of earlier times and places that still haunt her sense of life on this Pacific coast. She is intrigued by the psychological layering that governs what she sees as a kind of meditative painting, and that is always at work deconstructing the rooftops, troubling the perspective points, establishing odd, unpredictable demarcations and boundaries. To her, unpeopled, or barely peopled, paintings are haunted in the sense that she feels constantly intrigued and challenged by the notion of painting away spirits, painting exorcistically, expelling certain images and invoking others, however playfully. She revisions Santa Monica and its rugged surrounding mountains by reshaping visual fields and by focusing on hard-edges and the juxtaposition of planes in search of surreal or magically real effects. |