Eliza Douglas: I am All Soul

As a tall androgynous American female with a quietly radiant mission, Eliza Douglas creates a bright doorway through which the devil might come. And go. Mysterious, vanishing, chimerical, always surprising, Eliza’s bodies seem comic-book characters who elongated their arms at will, rescuing people, wrapping their stretchy limbs around a thief and making a smart remark like not so fast big guy.

In “I am All Soul”, hosted by Air de Paris until January 2017, the artist shows bodies that look like super heroes that are always both funny & noir, in a typical American tone. Eliza’s humble fantastic paintings are jokey, impossible and wittily structured in the ground. Her limbs sprout from the hands; a dumb fountain in the middle of the park portrays nothing but the ambition to spout water, passionately wondering if it is enough yet magical in its simplicity, in its enigmatic act: to be, and to deliberately appear as something human, a letter, deranged, but activated by a wish to put “hand” to paint.