Tula Telfair: Wilderness Does Not Locate Itself

There comes a point in the process of painting when the painting takes on a life of its own, regardless of its subject matter or style. Even representational painters stop observing the landscape, object or figure at this phase. The painting shifts into its own territory, becoming an independent entity to be shaped and resolved. Every painting, and arguably anything else born of the creative process, reaches this stage and ascends to something greater than the sum of its parts. Tula Telfair makes use of this phenomenon but pushes her work to venture even further beyond it. Her monumental, imagined landscapes, fully rendered in a style akin to photorealism, feel and function like real locations on the map. Telfair, an avid traveler who spent her childhood in Africa, Asia and Europe before returning to the United States, certainly has a large memory bank of locales to draw from when she is developing her compositions. Although memory plays a prominent role, it is not the whole story. The landscapes have been liberated to fulfill a purpose beyond mere documentation. Wilderness Does Not Locate Itself articulates a particular purpose: the wild mystery of nature does not willingly reveal itself. It is and will always remain a great unknown. Telfair's most recent group of paintings help us begin to sense what we can only surmise. 

A variety of moods are on display in Wilderness Does Not Locate Itself— from the idyllic, verdant and expansive to the foreboding, threatening and obstructive. The Image Repertoire (2022) depicts the view at the top of a mountain. The mountainside is covered in lush greenery and the sky is an electric blue, dashed with a line of cumulus clouds. Viewers are instantly transported to this fictional place and perhaps even reminded of the mountains they have scaled to take in a view. A Fragile Equilibrium (2022), on the other hand, offers stormy skies that hang over a river bend surrounded by thick forest and green clearings. Mountains appear in the distance, but so do hints of human-made structures, placing viewers squarely within the reaches of the picture plane. A more balanced and familiar version of life is illustrated here. The Place Where We Strayed (2022) is one of the more disquieting scenes in the exhibition. Viewers find a snowy hilltop dotted with trees or scrubby bushes up to its crest. The white snow is cast in warm shadow by the dark, red-streaked sky behind it. It is not clear if the sunset or something more calamitous is at cause, but it is clear that the situation is inescapable. 

What are viewers to make of the varied group of environments presented in Wilderness Does Not Locate Itself? Telfair proclaims that her career-long purpose is to create something like a composite portrait of the natural world, but a greater effect is realized. Through her near-religious reverence for nature and her technical skill in painting, she captures nature's agency in the process, too. Swept Away and Replaced by Another (2022) is an especially stirring work. It portrays a crater ringed in fire. Glowing coals surround and fill the crater, while the horizon line is delineated by a swipe of paint that appears white-hot. The title certainly implies catastrophe but nothing in the image indicates what may have prompted it. Only the fiery aftermath is visually evident. The Question of Ownership (2022) functions as a reminder that the constructed world has been left behind. An unkempt thicket that spills over the canvas's edges is an apt rebuttal to human attempts at laying claim to land. A Utopian Gesture (2022) sends a message of benevolence on nature's terms. A river snakes through a sweeping vista and wispy clouds sit just above a sky as blue as crystal clear Caribbean waters. 

In today's political landscape, Telfair's work might stir associations with climate change, but this is not her explicit intent. She believes in responsible stewardship of the earth and is intimately familiar with the myriad of ways in which human activity ripples through and alters the natural world, but she chooses nature as her subject simply out of deep admiration and an inexhaustible sense of wonder. The viewer is left to bring their own associations into her imagined environments and take from them whatever it is they most need. 

Boundlessness is the strongest force at work in all of Telfair's paintings. It is tempting to solely read them as warnings against human-driven climate change. It is equally tempting to see them as dream-like ideals or try to tease out the elements of reality they contain. While none of these readings are wholly untrue, they do not describe the totality of the result. Wilderness is that way— as hard as we may try to categorize, catalogue, map or conquer it, it will always be bigger than us and too unwieldy for our language and systems to contain. Art is that way, too. Taken with the artist's biography and the pressing issues of the day, we might believe we can analyze and trace the image before us, but of course there is always more. This dance between what we think we know and what we never truly will is precisely what makes Telfair's work so endlessly alluring.  

Tula Telfair's exhibition will be on view through December 24. Please send all inquiries to gallery@jeraldmelberg.com.