Ilana Savdie’s Fluorescent Paintings Conjure a Carnival of Chaos

Ilana Savdie is an archivist. Everywhere she goes, whether she’s traveling for work or on vacation, she is compelled to document the world. Horror movies, Italian basilicas, wrestling stills, Baroque sculpture, and the iconography of digital culture are among the varied inspirations cataloged in her notebooks and thousands of screenshots on her camera roll. To create her paintings in her Brooklyn studio, Savdie distills this cadre of influences into fluorescent, chaotic canvases, where distinctions between low and high art dissolve.

“An important way that I relate to the world is through image,” the artist said in an interview with Artsy. “There’s this democratization that happens—a non-hierarchical way of approaching both the high and low, a flattening [of] their level of importance to me.” Once these references are “flattened” in her mind, she envisions them “colliding” as she draws in her sketchpads or paints her canvases. She brings these mangled elements together to create compelling, unified paintings. The resulting expressive works—unsettling, mesmerizing, and evoking the uncertainty of the world we live in—are on view in “Ectopia” at White Cube in Paris until July 27th.

After completing her MFA at the Yale School of Art in 2018, Savdie quickly rose to acclaim. Her first breakthrough came with a solo exhibition at ltd los angeles in 2019, followed by 2021 solo exhibitions with Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles and Deli Gallery in New York. Building on that momentum, Savdie presented her work for the first time with White Cube in London in 2022. And in July 2023, the Whitney Museum of American Art staged a solo exhibition, “Radical Contractions,” a sign that the wider art world was taking notice.

Having grown up in Barranquilla, Colombia, Savdie credits much of her early influence to the city’s renowned carnaval, the second-largest celebration of its kind in the world. As a child, she watched the streets come alive with riots of color for the parades. Participants wore extravagant, often absurd costumes, such as the popular phallic marimonda mask, an elephant-monkey character meant to mock the oppressive elite. These early experiences ended up having an outsize influence on her work, evident in the bold, expressive use of color in her large-scale paintings.

Her work has continued to focus on how identity is performed and understood culturally. As well as the carnival masks, she has been inspired by everything from images of wrestling personalities to historical prints by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and the choreography of war scenes in films. These references are somewhat recognizable but distorted in her paintings, such as Spinal Sheds of a Desperate Glory, evocative of clashing wrestlers, or In your vast and ancient sorrow that was my home (all works 2024), a painting that distills abstract forms into a mask-like head. For Savdie, this interest in masking is related to her own queerness and the community’s connection to secrecy and performance. Queer people have, for centuries, been expected to conform publicly and therefore perform a homogenous identity for a supposedly straight society.

“I think often of the uniquely queer experience of being both encoded and exposed at the same time,” she said. “Performativity as both a masking and a shedding of that armor/skin/shell that can be as much protective as it is oppressive.”

In “Ectopia,” Savdie is fixated on two critical dichotomies. The first is between vulnerability and strength, which she discussed with Moran Sheleg, who wrote an essay, “Ilana Savdie’s Shadow Body,” to accompany the exhibition. “We were talking about the hero and the emergence of the hero in the spectacle of war. What does protection mean, real or diluted? A lot of these works make reference to the protective shell of crustaceans alongside references to the decadent armor of a warrior,” Savdie explained.

The second is between chaos and order. In paintings like Scattered Signals of the Upright, chaotic elements—such as swirling colors and fragmented shapes—are arranged to create a sense of underlying order. This oscillation between form and frenzy is representative of how we see ourselves, perceptions that are always shifting.

As well as the massive paintings, “Ectopia” features six pen drawings. After years of planning her work directly on the canvas, in 2020, the artist reintroduced drawing to her process as a way to develop a relationship with ideas parallel to her image archive. “Drawing was a way to step away from a reference image and sit with a feeling first—to just indulge my own relationship to something from memory alone,” Savdie said.

These works on paper, such as the frenetic pen drawing Hobby Horses, are always left unfinished and stand out amid her colossal paintings in the show. Savdie intends for viewers to independently find connections between her smaller drawings and the larger works exhibited together in “Ectopia.” For instance, the painting Paper Planes, marked by colliding iridescent greens, pinks, purples, and oranges, seems to relate to the mangled faces and limbs that appear in Hobby Horses.

When she actually begins her paintings, she first pours paint and melted beeswax onto the canvas, watching it “glacially travel” across its surface. Then, she cross-references her drawings and her archive of images. “It becomes about being responsive both to the decisions that I made in the sketch and the decisions that the material made on canvas. In that interplay, I find the final form,” she said. From there, the painting is a process of balancing her various influences, references, and sketches.