Melinda Hackett is passionate, painstaking, and fastidious in her search. Nearly fanatical at times. Her forms are distinctive and intense. Like Ranee, Hackett prides herself on historical endorsements: Miro, Gorky, and Hilma af Klint. Her color is pitched in a higher key but suggests nighttime enchantment with silvery whites and fluttering greens. These works count on a fictionalized drama, on otherworldliness, like concrete dreams, albeit oblique, evoking the idealized world of compatibility. Like a heavenly Pacman console. Hilma af Klint has been trending for some time, and her spiritual, nearly occult status, upended all conventional timelines. Hackett shares the spiritual qualities of Hilma af Klint, although far more down-to-earth or possibly subterranean. And Hackett leans more heavily on animating her shapes and colors as entities unto themselves, small realities, or anima mundi. Here the belief is of a life force that permeates everything.
Erika Ranee summersaults her way to the surface of a painting with winding webs of color stretched like limbs from top to bottom while forming distinct shapes and reversals. On occasion, she slows down a little, then takes strides before accelerating in a flourish of physicality. Ranee thrives on urgency and command. Her palette shimmers and glows as she makes instinctively buzzy, dazzling, visceral works that are self-possessed and firmly fixed in time and space. Compression is vital; her paintings conjure up Georges Braque's seven Billiard Table paintings from 1944 to 1952 when the master engineered some of the finest paintings of the previous century. Like Braque's paintings, Ranee's works are gripping, generous, and dignified. The emotional breadth of Braque's work knows loss; it means losing what was. Braque patiently arrives at his painterly conclusions while aging before our eyes, occupying him for over a decade—soul work. Fortunately, Ranee is still on the march.
Hackett and Ranee were chosen to carry on; it is a mantle worn by few. Beyond the few glories of a painter's studio life and those rare occasions of delight is that plaguing reality, history will have a say. The language of painting is a mystery, unveiled only by ongoing work and countless failures. Hackett and Ranee have gifted us with their transient conclusions, a tiny piece of reality, of a face, worth considering over and over, through time and, eventually, history. Remarkably, these faces will change and adapt new and different meanings because embedded in these paintings is a life.
~George Negroponte
