By Dan Aldo
The overriding subject of the work by Heidi Fosli exhibited at Artifact is a human condition within Nature. It is seen as the manifestation of a unifying spirit that precedes and often precludes the observer. It is a reality removed from the everyday, away from the prosaic. These elements in Fosli’s work celebrate the awareness of humbleness and the mystery that is to be found in the everyday. The artist uses scale shifts in order to arouse within us a sense of the sublimeness and infinite potential. The key to these paintings is their resourcefulness and deceptive simplicity, which resonate with primal contrasts and oppositions within each composition.
This tension of opposites which leads to the excellence of form-making in the artist’s painterly works is the result of a harmonious fusion of object presented, the object suggested, and, through image evoked, the “thing” expressed. The artist succeeded in her painterly goals of transcending time and space while still adhering to the here and now. This superimposition of the timely and the timeless in her work changes the traditional view of painting as either purely a category of perception or as means to record with some exactitude indexical reality.
Thus, Fosli’s work wisely allows us to apprehend her own unique approach in which a Heideggerian impulse to allow the world to “unconceal” itself is the primary, motivating factor in the making of the art. Here, intuitive knowledge is the ordering principle of the world, and the viewer experiences artist’s poetic integrity that charges all of her work with convincing rightness and embody perceptions of figurative abstraction within the body proper of Art.