At Leidy Churchman’s “Heart Drop,” what unfolds is not rooted in rationality nor the immediate appearance of the paintings. The show features winsome and playful subjects, colors and text, yielding an impression of light-hearted themes that in time reveal pictures that are careful, alert and ruminative. These works embark on a long painterly tradition of using symbols and visual and written language as windows to mystic truth. The frameless paintings in oil on linen, most smaller than a poster, follow Churchman’s longstanding practice of foregrounding precisely the right components of stray subjects. The artist’s decision to hang the paintings at various heights like notes on a musical score, combined with their encyclopedic approach to subject matter, are remarkably effective at stirring a wistful enchantment, a feeling that became my companion as I immersed myself in the show. 

In the world that Churchman has created, there is the sensation that things on Earth are plump, banal, rich, awake, tethered, brimming. The moments depicted on the wall—such as an aerial view of water rippling through a garden container filled with nasturtiums, or a contemplative still life showcasing seashells arranged on a table in a provisional room—seem to be outside of time, both happening all at once and already passed. Churchman’s enigmatic renderings appear almost like a roulette of stills, and they capture a subjective experience that is at once impermanent and ubiquitous. How magnificent it is that an olive-green painting bearing the inscription “The Laundry Room” or, a depiction of an explosion presented alongside a spirited, stuck-out tongue, being can prompt me to wonder if this is their experience, my experience, or your experience. You do not need to possess these works to comprehend them, an artistic gesture that creates an unexpected sense of shared humaneness.

Leidy Churchman, The Supreme Joy Beyond All Suffering, 2023. ©Leidy Churchman. Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

For instance, Password Bibby (all works 2023), a painting of Churchman’s computer login screen, whose wallpaper depicts a group of six or seven elephants using their trunks to prod and caress the remains of a former living elephant, registers as a triumphantly corporeal modern truth. Both the heaviness of the skull and the communal weight of their touching pushes the remains into the soil. With Churchman’s password pending, here are animals in the middle of confronting mortality. Elephants fumbling with bones is the kind of fumbling that incites a recognition of existence. All the time, this juxtaposition of a sapient level of sentience and an ordinary task like checking email is upon us.

This feeling of being invited and included, of moving melodically from one painting’s sphere to the next, absorbed by the rendering in front of me, not worried about where I’ll go next, had a powerful effect on me. Churchman presents a tender and lucid peek into a dimension that is at our fingertips every day, a mode of rejoicing that is just a blink of an eye away from connecting us to everything.