An Ecstatic (echo)

For An Ecstatic (echo), the Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu continues the operative mode she has been experimenting with since the mid-2010s. Starting with a press photograph that is blurred, reframed, then transferred onto the canvas to become its underlayer, the artist adds graphic notations using various tools and processes: ink and acrylic brush, spray gun, digital retouches, scratching. The original photograph is blurred enough to erase faces and spatial markers, retaining only the "DNA" of the photograph, its spectral power.

Julie Mehretu's recent canvases thus operate according to a dynamic choreography of graphic gestures, with the artist's hand reconnecting with the pulsional and seismographic force of drawing. The predominance of gray and the use of acidic and exuberant colors cast a shadow of menace, subconsciously recalling a traumatic present: migration crises, global warming, giant wildfires, ecological devastation, the rise of fascism in international politics—all profound upheavals for which Julie Mehretu's work offers an emancipatory reconfiguration.