It’s a somewhat startling, eye-blinding–certainly eye unsettling–juxtaposition: on the one hand an abstract expressionistic painting, full of powerful, explosive gestures–at once strong-willed and spontaneous, indeed aggressively spirited–and flashing colors, adding to the overall excitement and intensity and on the other side, a usually more subdued, if still sensuously seductive–and often texturally provocative (if in a different way than the expressionistic painting) fabric surface, sometimes inscribed with an imagistic pattern. Errand into the Wilderness, 1995, Love Supreme, 1996, Psyche’s Soul, 1997 and Song of Orange, For Mingus, 1997, among many other diptychs, bowled me over with the boldness of their juxtapositions. Reflecting on the experience I realized that it was much more than a matter of the shock of the new–of the daring originality of Weld’s perceptual drama. She has found an unusually fresh way to visually embody psychic conflict–that’s what conceptually engaged me.

The electrifying contradictoriness of the canvases, yet the elusive dialectic generated by their friction–they seemed repelled by each other, but also subliminally “aligned”–symbolizes the divided self, and perhaps its aborted yearning to be whole. Weld is not merely a clever postmodernist, gratuitously contrasting modernist styles, as though suggesting that one is no more valid than any other–pure painting and impure image are equally legitimate modes in her diptychs–but rather reminding us, in no uncertain terms, of an emotional truth we are reluctant to acknowledge. She’s ripped away the veil of amnesia that hides the fact that we are permanently divided against ourselves. Her canvases enact the inner drama of every life through their own militant difference. The diptychs are constructed of opposing styles, which are all art historically familiar, but Weld’s discomforting juxtaposition of them brings out their radical difference, implying that it is impossible to reconcile them, which restores them to unfamiliarity, and with that to emotional credibility. The parts of Weld’s diptychs seem to fall apart yet they remain together, giving the diptychs as a whole a paradoxical integrity.

Springfield Museum of Art exhibition catalogue: Allegories of Strife: The Diptychs of Alison Weld, 1990 - 2005, Springfield, Ohio 2006