Mary Corman paints interiors that are empty but not deserted, ethereal but not ghostly. Time is drifting through amber here, slowly mottling uneven walls and canted arches that feel as much flesh as plaster.
Where are we as we face two dark arches at ground level in Monks’ Promenoir? To our left is a flat plane of warm gray, as if rust had been mixed with ash. On the right, a triangular ceiling vault brushed with breaths of yellow spreads upward, like a ballerina en pointe, providing a fulcrum for angles in the composition to converge upon. A sense of vertigo arises, as if we have just made a turn down a stairwell.
Certainly we promenade through Corman’s spaces at a monk’s slow pace, aware of the material structures but also contemplative amid this limbo-like radiance. The slightly off-kilter curves, niches, and corners of these bare rooms and courtyards enhance their beguiling narratives of expectation: visitors, guests, friends, strangers — all are out of the frame, leaving only the viewer to inhabit the radiant realms.
The ballerina’s vertigo: “Monks’ Promenoir” (2025).
There are no decorations, furniture, wall hangings, or utensils here, and yet the warm, suffused light is welcoming. (All of the works in the exhibition, Lightbridge, were done in 2025, during part of which Corman was in a residency at the American Academy in Rome, that city where history settles like silt upon chiaroscuro vistas of weathered stone.) The emptiness in Corman’s world is not that of some Covid ghost town or depopulation from a plague or war. It feels more like one of those dreams you might have where some unknown space — a large addition to your tiny New York apartment, for example — appears in your periphery but dissolves just as you try to enter. Then you awaken.
The Rock, though only 16 inches high, exudes a powerful presence, the exquisitely gradated colors creating a pulse as the eye tries to determine if the yellow rectangle on the upper right is a column with a stepped base or a portal to a stairway. Similarly, is the blue-gray vertical on the left open or solid? And why was this structure built around that lumpy block that is edging out of the frame on the mezzanine? Or is the titular “rock” actually that brown dragon’s-tail blob, as frozen as Laocoön‘s marble serpent? Be careful on the steps leading to the lower level, as a zigzag of cool darkness implies an uneven, long-ago-settled tripping hazard. These are spaces that have been worn down and gently warped by vast stretches of time, with untold inhabitants passing through past, present, and future — only not at these exact, eternally suspended moments.
The viewer must make choices in “Marveille” (2025).
Corman’s sleight-of-hand with angles and misty shadows presents not Escher-like puzzles but more the mystery of di Chirico’s sun-struck plazas, where shades and statues and columns take on corporeal heft. For indeed, architecture is the protagonist in Corman’s domain, as weirdly palpable as the heartbeat under the floor in Poe’s tale. In Marveille, as we enter the frame at a spot where the passage is dropping away, the foreground arch is as lithe and graceful as one of Moholy-Nagy’s questing photograms. Then our eyes snake through the corridor, wondering which way to turn: the strangely partitioned room through the second arch, or the blind alley going to the right? The viewer as explorer — or perhaps pursuer.
Or pursued.
It is to the works’ credit that they so easily conjure surreal visions — beautiful as images, yet compelling in their ideas of how humans relate to their dens. Corman offers us less a theater of the absurd than stage sets for astral projections. A gorgeous, if melancholy, anticipation radiates from these paintings, as if they are the place Godot has just left, never to arrive anywhere again. ❖
Lightbridge
Turn Gallery
32 East 68th Street, 2nd Floor
Through December 17
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