Children in a smoke-filled room.  Dazzling blue.  A distant fire.  Dinner and cigarettes in the backyard.  Blue and red, and empty space.  Something’s awry, amiss.  

Coy and fetching amidst the haze…A girl in red stockings looks away.  I want her to turn around.  I want to ask her out.  We would go to a dark bar.  We would sit in a dark booth.  We would order Plymouth Gin martinis with just one olive.  We would stay until last call and we would leave into the foggy night.

Lemonade, 2012

ballpoint on paper, 11x16

The drawings (and paintings) of Vanessa Prager possess both mystery and manners -- her content: so strangely both old-fashioned and post-Postmodern at the same time: her methods – the unique use of light, of color – of absence and of presence, and of the presence of absence – her angle of approach. 

A stampede into flame, suddenly still – the elephants at rest, posing for photographs.  Fog, mist, smoke – in Vanessa’s work they all add up to some kind of halo -- something spectral, almost sacred – the haunting of thwarted longing.  The women in red, with their heads thrown back – stylish and pained, hopeful and desperate.  The last, Last Picture Show.  A romantic apocalypse.  A deliberate blurring of decades; the present is the past. A time gone by; only it’s now. 

Moonlight,  2012

ballpoint on paper, 18x24

Outside, the girl in red stockings lights a cigarette, adding smoke to the night-time fog and mist.  I take her hand.  She pulls away.  I understand.  Then she pulls me close.  She kisses me and bites my lip.  I bleed.  We stride into a deepening mist. 

Never There, 2012

ballpoint on paper 24x18

Black Tie,, 2012

ballpoint on paper, 18x24

I want to stare at Vanessa’s pictures for hours, maybe days, and I want to tell more stories, to spin the tales her images inspire.

You too can see Vanessa Prager’s work from November 10 to December 15 at The Richard Heller Gallery. 

Written by Larry Fondation