Pushed up against the picture plane of a vast theatrical set divided by foreground and background, Acierno's figures are protagonists in night-time scenarios charged with a dream-like quality. Drawn into the darkness, our eyes adjust, and different elements resolve, some mundane and others surreal. In this state of heightened awareness, as familiar objects and places assume eerie qualities, the stillness feels misleading, obscure in every sense. The effect is 'slippage', a liminal experience occurring at the juncture between disparate elements. Here, slippage is both in the illustrated event and in our visual encounter of Acierno’s low-key palette. Humans are a diurnal species. Our pupils dilate in low light, and through this greater aperture, our retinae pick up random noise, giving the imagination free reign to augment reality.
With her oneiric visions, Acierno rejoins a long tradition of artists who have probed the genre. Hers is not the tenebrism of Caravaggio's chiaroscuro, with its single light source used to dramatic effect. Her nights are moonless, recalling Goya's fourteen 'pinturas negras', painted as a response to the horrors of his age, which include Saturn Devouring his Son, and El Perro, also known as The Drowning Dog. It is in this darkness, in which our vision discerns shades of grey, and the more visible wavelengths halfway between green and blue-green, that Acierno's colours quietly smoulder.
The ‘encounter’ is central to these works. It is a word that carries an undertone of confrontation and suggests the tension or uncanniness that accompanies an encounter, especially under cover of darkness. As Kafka, who suffered from insomnia, noted: “The Dread of night. Dread of not-night. Dreams!” [1] But where it was once the realm of activities both sacred and profane, true darkness is receding into a certain trope in an age of artificial light. Acierno returns us to this depth of darkness, where senses are heightened to hear sounds in the silence, to almost smell the death of a fish out of water, the mid-ocean night air, the musky scent barely contained between parted thighs.
Literature plays a formative role in the artist's practice. For this series, she evokes the works of Kafka and Camus, but so too, Julio Cortazar, Gogol and Beckett. The titles for two of the works, Amerika and Nature Theatre of Oklahoma at Night, are borrowed from Franz Kafka's incomplete first novel. His exploration of social absurdity and existential heaviness or shame, and the otherness or depersonalization examined by Camus in The Stranger were likewise key themes for this body of work.
Among the indices in this show, one could read its title, The Albatross, as a significant allusion not just to a psychological burden - the weight of sin borne from its killing in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) - but, moreover, to the rupture between the natural and spiritual worlds caused by human incomprehension. It is a destruction of the sublime by the mundane echoed by Baudelaire's poem of the same title.
Another referent for the artist is Balthus, and Acierno’s works are similarly imbued with set-like divisions of foreground and background. As she suggests, a painting is a one-act play, and in her piece Otto and Klaus, the two protagonists coexist in a Beckettian tableau of pitiful yearning and unrequited affection. The canine Klaus refuses the symbol of companionship expected of his kind with wide-eyed indifference, much like the dogs in Night Walk are separate from the man smoking on the seashore in the dead of night.
Nor do the humans throughout the series connect among themselves, though some glare intently at the viewer. Leaving the House, Followed evokes the unease of not knowing. Suspended between past and future events, the work exists in a state of dislocation, too ambiguous for the viewer to interpret with any certainty. The solitude that separates the figures extends beyond the frame to the viewer observing the encounter - outsiders all.
In Evening Broadcast, Acierno floods the darkness with red light, recalling the peep shows of pleasure districts, or thermal imaging of surveillance and AI. Her figures, seated alongside each other, exist in separate worlds, expressing a domestic scene she describes as 'small horrors – the horror of the evening broadcast, the horror of suburban alienation'. The pairing of her highly oxygenated blood red with sallow green prompts the idle speculation that for a colourblind viewer, the image may not exist at all. What is real? A question that rests in the title of one of her works, non-sum hic - Latin for "I am not here" - the spectre-like portrait that appears to almost resolve and dissolve like a smudge from the fragile dust of beating moth wings.
That which is real in The Albatross is left receding, slipping slightly beyond the viewer’s grasp – a fleeting encounter. Perhaps the unsettling intimacy of Acierno's images is owed to her relationship to painting itself as an encounter with the uncanny, evolving through the volition of pigment and intuitions of the artist's subconscious, almost in sight, yet ever receding.
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[1] Blue Octavo Notebooks (Oct 18, 1917)