Registers

Friday, September 21, 1979
Got up and wandered around, passing out (the magazine) Interview. I went to Manolo Blahnik’s new shoe store on 65th and Madison, next to Kron’s, really beautiful, one-of-a-kind shoes.
— The Andy Warhol Diaries

I’ve wondered why Warhol’s early pictures of shoes articulate in a way that supposedly more ‘substantial’ painting tends to neglect. It’s something to do with the attention given to the curve of a single precise pencil line or the application of gold leaf in conjunction with a pink wash that projects with such conviction that heels matter; that they have a place in his world, reflective of a particular attitude that is deeply touching. Weise’s small painting of ankles in stilettoes with teeth, though different in character, with blue black flourishes of the brush on a reddish ground, seems to claim a significance that’s central to her otherwise very diverse treatment of subject.

Perhaps it is in the nature of accessories and their place in the larger corpus of fashion to profoundly exercise affect through the slightest accent or gesture. It’s a quality associated with the ‘minor,’ a particular register more often identified in literature but which Weise seems to exploit, whether through her concern with the writer Clarice Lispector or directly in her painting. For talk of minor is not so much about scale, Weise’s paintings are often very large, rather there’s an attention to tone or timbre, achieved through small inflections or marks whether in the shape of faintly drawn eyes that echo what might be an elegant fur cloak or the overtly sexual black painting of a nude still wearing her Manolo Blahnik’s. Whether then it’s the thickly rendered oil of a work inscribed Mama or the quietly refined figure gazing into an arabesque mirror, we are left with an acute awareness of something staged.

Ian Kiaer, De Ateliers, 2016