Michael Eldridge - Sibilla Night 5

A mental soarer of landscapes that his retina, like a thermograph, reads as intensely energetic and chromatic, Michael Eldridge masters a rare style of painting that precisely conveys their different temperatures across layers or surfaces with a broad, clear palette, rich in shifts, synchronies, and diachronies. Earth pulp or earth skin traversed by normally discrete signs of natural or artificial separations. The visual results are often improbable maps of real territories, of natural conditions, ideal lands for human habitation, as in Campi rossi (Red Fields) from 2007, where the diagonal construction of the territory synthesizes not only the different conformations, but the different "climates" experienced by the lands with the warm epicenter of red. The same discourse, interpreted in a sort of vertical stratigraphy, is found in Fire Moon, where the reading from the depths of the earth reaches up to the sky. He recently settled in the Marche region, in the shadow of the magical Sibillini Mountains, and is dedicating himself more intensely to painting: large and small white sheets that he then rolls up, only some of which are stretched on looms and rarely in frames. Pieces of the world cannot be confined in any way. An excellent photographer, accustomed to seeking the right shot, in conceiving his pictorial images he doesn't seem to pursue reality, but rather the pure sensations he captures from the landscape, which are, at once, visual, auditory, thermal, and olfactory. Accustomed to traveling the world, and not currently able or comfortable exploring space, he often synthesizes climates, weather patterns, conformations, and conditions that he spreads out in zones of color delimited by fractures, rivers, lakes, and roads, thus marking different temperatures, smells, and shimmers. As in Summer Fields, 2006, rich in chromatic shifts and irregular partitions. Michael feels like a subject of the air, and from the air, like a bird, he sees a synthetic world, somewhat like the Futurist aeropainters. But he flies slowly, like a bird, freezing and measuring temperatures, not fleeing on engines that make the landscape slip before your eyes. Thus, his vision, not distorted and dilated, but thermal, manages to penetrate the surface to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the altitude; sometimes, however, he detaches himself only a few meters from the earth, to capture it at close range or to look to the sides, but much more discreetly than usual from above, as in Red Canyon, Dark Sky. From the sky, which is not air, he sees and grasps light and darkness and their respective energies; he feels the immensity of the sky that cannot be captured, as in Cielo violento (2006) or Corn Field (2008). The earth is beneath the sky and in the air: energy flows and races between them, especially at night; the artist seeks to transform it into a fluid, colored material, depending on heat, humidity, and consistency. This is the case in Karoo Night, 2007, where the red between the sky and the earth clearly indicates the rising energy. Eldridge's canvases feature only bare landscape; trees are rare, there are a few traces of animals, and no human presence—in short, a lack of any signs of human presence: an exclusive relationship between him and the universe. His painting, in fact, is purely abstract, especially chromatic, with unclear influences—perhaps "Fauve" in its colors, but not in its figuration. In some cases, the influences of Rothko's abstract painting (and his surreal antecedents) are more pronounced, as can be seen in Red Sky, 2007, whose purity and chromatic balance between red and black, the former barely flecked with marginal clouds, reveals a more general interest in the post-World War II avant-gardes of Europe and America, or in the more pictorially ironic Three Trees, for the somewhat affected little trees inscribed within the brightly colored geometric shapes. Ultimately, Eldridge, a multifaceted cultural operator with significant experience between Europe and America, reveals in his painting an originality rich in suggestions that will not fail to arouse interest.

Massimo Duranti Art critic and author

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