A Conversation with Madeline Gallucci, conducted by Elizabeth Lalley
Elizabeth Lalley: Your ongoing interest in mirrors—in both their material surfaces and in their complex psychological relationship to our senses of self—continues in fascinating ways with the new works in “sound of my father singing.’ There remains the complex navigation of what it means when we’re confronted with a mirror that presents no reflection. I love how there’s a literal loss of self here (we, the paintings’ viewers, are made invisible), and how it lays bare the apparatus of the mirror more directly, as we encounter them without their appraisal of us. Without our reflections, these mirrors and their surfaces are like portals through time, layered with residue (writing, smudges, cracks) that, to me, are very much about painting and gestures of the hand, but also these complex questions about image, illusion, manipulation, construction. This is a long way of asking: can you talk about both the psychological and material spaces that mirrors open for you in painting? How have you continued to deepen and expand your investigations into these mirrored, refracted spaces and what do you continue to discover?
Madeline Gallucci: This series began in graduate school when I was taking a class in melodrama film and became interested in how mirrors served as sites of physiological and physical transformation. Directors like Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder were highly influential in my early compositions, as they used the camera to compress space and construct points of interaction and personal discovery through these reflective surfaces.
At this time I was also collecting photos of mirrors in bar bathrooms around Chicago. The photos were positioned from an angle where my body was removed, though it was still implied by the action of taking a picture. During the pandemic, I returned to a steady painting practice, and reinvestigated many of these images and began to paint them as a way to reconnect to these spaces.
Now, the mirror has evolved from a rendered object to more conceptual and psychological compositions. I’m also bringing in more fragments of my own personal histories and direct observations. We are constantly moving through a world bombarded with images, text, advertising, and screens demanding our attention, while also (perhaps unconsciously) making us consider our position in the world and our relationship to them. The mirror directly allows a way to confront ourselves and self-monitor our own appearance, behavior, and connection to these influences. But what happens when that reflection is false, fabricated, or simply not there? What if our vision of ourselves is not aligned with what we see in the mirror?
Materially speaking, I’ve started working in both acrylic and oil which have allowed for two different paces in the work. I apply thin layers of gesso to allow the paint to soak into the canvas and create these matte textured surfaces. The acrylic layers are fast and are often painted while I’m hovering over the canvases on the floor, with no clear orientation, slopping around water, mediums, pigments and paints to start layering down color, text, and simple forms. The text is automatic and intuitive, and often starts with a word that rolls around in my head. Most of the time the text is illegible but might focus on a certain letter or movement in the scrawl.
After they dry, I look for moments to be highlighted, refined or erased. I layer oil paint as an overlay of the acrylic and begin to vary the color density and create a sense of depth and separation, like scratches on a mirror. I fuss with color so much. It’s deeply satisfying when things click into place and they begin to harmonize or vibrate.
EL: There’s an acute sociability to your paintings. They feel so social in nature to me, though they’re devoid of direct reflections or clear figures of any sort. They almost give me the thrill of trespassing, of peeking into something we are not directly part of. They feel like entering a party that has just ended, and we’re piecing together parts of the night. There’s the immediacy here of scrawling your name across the mirror in a bar, or in a bathroom stall, or carving initials into a rock—that assertion of “being here,” captured at a moment of joy or lowered inhibition. But within this, there’s a longing, too—a forced distancing. Your paintings ask us to embody the position of a detective, a time-traveler, someone on a walk in a foreign place, in a way. We’re projecting ourselves into something that happened without us, trying to decipher the remnants and marks. Can you talk a little about how you consider these ideas of residue, accumulation, sociability and activity, in terms of how we “read” these paintings and attempt to decipher or piece together the various linguistic fragments they present?
MG: The core texture of the work began with examining and documenting the frenzy of marks and writing that occurs in the private spaces of public bathrooms. I was intrigued by how these spaces felt simultaneously full and empty, and the ways we look for patterns in static to seek meaning or connection. I examine these manipulations of space and also consider how time is measured through accumulation and erasure. It's funny you mention “a walk in a foreign place” as I frequently travel for work. I am always observing how cities become a canvas for accidental moments and residue, alongside intentional graffiti and vandalism. It feels the same but different everywhere, and when you find it, it feels more intrusive or intentional.
The text is more about atmosphere than it is about deciphering a sentence or phrase. I am interested in the way that text exists all around us and it is up to our attention to decide how and what to pay attention to. Like a word that is repeated to the point where we can no longer find meaning, I oscillate between blurring and focusing. I want to convey a sense of muffled chatter – maybe this “sociability” you mention– the feeling of being inside and outside the house party at the same time.
EL: Returning to mirrors: I’m thinking about what you’ve said before, regarding the performance/presentation of self…how so much of this is influenced and shaped by reflections (in our phone cameras, in mirrors, in reflections on the sides of buildings, in Zoom meetings, etc) that are never really “true” but always mediated by the apparatus that is operating, manipulated by light, by scale, by materiality, etc. This is related to my earlier question, but I’m curious to know more about your material approach to painting reflections. Beyond the psychological and conceptual interests that mirroring offers as a subject matter, how do you navigate it through paint and through the spatial decisions you’re making? How do the behaviors of mirrors/reflections/screens inform your painting process?
MG: Since the painting process often starts with photography, I’m often mitigating these works through a lens already. I’m interested in how the mirror serves as a framing device: simultaneously an object and image. I see the use of screens the same way. What is revealed or shifted through the changing of one's position on the computer screen or a phone? Like the way our body can look unbecoming in one angle and flattering in the next. It’s a way of positioning; it’s our vantage point in relation to the fuller picture. I hope that the paintings actually collapse this viewpoint, because they become more confusing the more you dive in. In all cases, I am interested again in the format and in repetition to begin to improvise new forms. I think that these tensions between the surface and framing begin to shift in these paintings.
EL: Several of your mirror paintings depict an oval frame, which I love for purely visual reasons (the oval contained in the rectangle of the canvas), but also because of the ‘object-ness’ it provides the mirror, nodding to it as a thing, existing in a place somewhere. Many other of your paintings move beyond representing the frame, as though operating as the surface of the mirror themselves. In terms of representing the mirror’s frame or treating the canvas as the mirrored surface: is there a difference conceptually and in approach here?
MG: The oval was my original entry point into thinking about this framing and positioning that came directly from mirrors I encountered in the world or the ones I saw in melodrama films. With the body removed they became so alien, I see them as this closed loop of frame within frame within frame. The oval is still a specific way I think about this work, but I wanted to expand this perspective into thinking about the full frame and how we might only see a slice of something rather than the whole picture. I also want to challenge myself of what I consider a mirror and maybe it’s less about what’s there and more about what isn’t. There’s absolutely nothing reflective about them, they are matte and dim.
EL: I’m interested in your paintings’ relationships to time…where they feel located in time and how they seem to compress it. They are loaded with accumulated marks, symbols, shapes, and they are so much about residue and these worn surfaces that suggest the passing of time, but there are also these gestures of wiping, erasing, and scrawling that have this absolute immediacy to them. I think of wiping steam off a bathroom window, or even the action of wiper-blades across a windshield, constantly removing the elements. Can you talk a little about how you think about time within this work? Particularly in terms of the tension between accumulation and erasure, which, as I mentioned, creates this strange and wonderful compression, where immediacy bumps up against the passage of time?
MG: These residues and surfaces are something that I am especially sensitive to in the world and what I try to harness in my paintings. During the summers, I often go to Hyde Park to swim at Promontory Point. There’s a pedestrian tunnel under Lakeshore Drive that constantly is rotating with graffiti, accidental marks and thousands of spider webs. I think about this surface as a strange public message board that is routinely erased and cleaned by the city. I am interested in how these public surfaces are constantly shifting with marks, symbols, and language. There’s a sense of randomness that generates excitement for me… I think about what ways I can train myself to both be planned and spontaneous.
EL: I want to ask about the addition of blue tape, painted onto several of the works on view in this exhibition. I love this move because it gives such a pointed effect of tromp l’oeil. The tape is so tactile and decisive. It feels very much in “our world” while the mirrors/reflected surfaces feel akin to vortexes or portals, glowing with mystery. The addition of this utilitarian form, in contact with these swirling, groundless spaces, creates a fascinating push-and-pull between illusion and reality, which in turns, feeds into the larger questions that you’ve been exploring in your work. Can you talk a little about these moments of illusion and “reality” ? How is the motif of blue tape and its nod to utility playing with these surfaces for you?
MG: The tape explores the immediacy of the paintings’ surfaces, and how something provisional can be permanent. The blue tape has an association with many types of labor, including studio and house painting, that I am attracted to. I think about these tape marks alongside other bits of accumulation; the action of posting an “out of order” notice, a demarcation of an edge, an X on a pane of glass to prevent it from breaking. I find that bringing in the painted blue tape commands and contributes to the flatness that I'm interested in generating on the surface of the painting, and it directly references its own action.
EL: Something else that is striking to me about the blue tape is the way it functions as this bold slice of thick color, cutting across the picture plane. Your use of color is fascinating to me because it aids in this flattening of time that happens in the work. Neon pink scrawl in “Mirror (Lover’s Woods)” seems to have been applied atop a swirl of blurry pastel marks that suggest a faded, worn-in surface, but then the green of oval frame and the edges of the canvas feel like they’re about to swallow everything within them, including that neon pink text. So in this way, they capture the life of surfaces (underpasses, alleyways, the sides of buildings) where paint and graffiti and new layers of paint and new graffiti are constantly negotiating a state of impermanence. Can you talk a bit about your approach to color? How much of your use of color is planned versus intuitive/spontaneous?
MG: Color is such a particular and personal thing that is so elusive for me to explain. I find that I’m rather intuitive with color and will use bold saturated colors that hold a lot of weight and emotion. I often wrestle with it when I paint, which contributes to bouncing between a feeling of aggression and suppression– sometimes the paintings become blacked out or scrubbed over to allow a bit of the fluorescence to shine through. I recently viewed the Philip Guston retrospective at the Tate Modern in London, which was absolutely fantastic. Some of the wall text references his use of color, specifically his affinity for red, quoting him as saying: “It took me a few years to get the feeling of red…I just like it. I couldn’t tell you why.” I find this quote so perfect, as I find there is a mystery in how and why we are attracted to a certain color. I find that I am constantly revisiting certain colors, like hot pink, to see what they can do each time I use them.
EL: Can you talk a bit about the influence of place on your practice? Specifically the influence of Chicago?
MG: I never realized how important “place” is to my practice until I started traveling so much for my job. Though I’m originally from North Carolina, I have lived in the Midwest for 15 years (previously Kansas City). There’s a stillness here that’s different, and a brimming of potential. The sprawl and the positioning of Chicago on the lake always feels like it’s on the edge of something. As I have mentioned previously, there are certain places in the city that have specifically inspired this work, but I am also using Chicago as a lens to explore the universality of these moments in other cities and landscapes.
