Under the Skin: The Drawings of Suellen Rocca
Matthew Marks Gallery
·Fall 2018
Hidden Danger Lady, a drawing by Suellen Rocca initiated in 1984 and completed in 2012, presents a figure sitting cross-legged, her shadow extend- ing into the work’s foreground. Her arms terminate not in fingered hands but, grotesquely, in spiky points, and her head is similarly pointed and husk-like. Yet whatever danger is intimated by the work’s title and its alien subject is obscured by lines that cover her skin in mesmerizingly intricate stitch-like marks, distracting the eye. Where the figure ends and the background begins, these lines transform into coursing ripples that extend gently across the entirety of the plane behind her, as if to ease the viewer into a potentially jeopardous complacency. . .