Through suggestive, haptic counter-balancing of configurations, [Alison] Weld constructs a world as no other painter. It is the riveting play of contrasts that gets to you, the invitation to assign value. In her works juxtaposition raises its head on every level: proportion, texture, weight, even smell seems magnified, almost exalted. The artist is a wizard of antinomies when it comes to the play of surfaces and their associations . . .

[The artist's] mongrel fusion between fabric and its phenotype, between handmade and gesture, lets through the codes of expressionism. In a strange and miraculous way, the values of sincerity are re-assessed through the guileless (im)purity of mass production . . .

Weld involves us in time traveling, as we hurl through the history of styles, fashion and taste. She has a yen for surfaces and ornamentation that recall certain time periods or activities: ab-ex and neo-ex intervene with the retro look of fake green fur, interface with soft pliable satiny-sheened vinyl or luxuriate with a meretriciously fake alligator-pebbly surface. Weld investigates how meaning is constructed.

Excerpt from The Emotional Life of Inanimate Things,
© Dominique Nahas, exhibition brochure for Alison Weld, Recent Paintings, January 9, 2003 - February 8, 2003, Robert Steele Gallery, New York, NY.

Dominique Nahas is an independent curator and critic based
in Manhattan.