The work of Alicia Adamerovich tends to slip into some mysterious, metaphysical dimension where nature comes to life and reveals its silent energy and universal order.

Adamerovich’s practice originates from her deep connection with nature that developed when she was a child growing up in Pennsylvania, just near the forest. 

She always found the forest a secure place of regeneration, solace, but also atonement, feeling a subjection to the sublime energies the surrounding flora emanates. 

Despite the intimate and introspective mood her work tends to convey, when we meet at her studio in Brooklyn, Adamerovich turns out to be an extremely outgoing individual, open for an inspiring conversation.

The artist recently moved to a bigger space with great natural light and enough room to allow her to do multiple works at the same time, and even has a separate section of the studio dedicated to her wood carving practice.

Inside this special section lies an enigmatic shape of wood she sourced from the forest close to her parents’ house: its unique conformations gives it the appearance of having its own character, something the artist also feels and that she will try to give a voice.

There are very few artists working with wood today, especially in the confines of New York, but in shaping her seemingly timeless and almost totemic forms, Adamerovich demonstrates a rare confidence that stems from her deep connection with nature. Ademerovich confesses that her father is a carpenter, who initially taught her the basics in carving, and which soon became one of the preferred artistic mediums in her practice. Later I would also learn that her mother is a biologist.

Interestingly, Adamerovich’s works seem to live at this intersection between the anthropic need to shape reality and reconstruct it to some rational order through scientific observation, and the organic flow of forms and lines that biology naturally reveals existing in nature. Adamerovich explains to me that most of her work starts from free drawings, where the artist takes “a line for a walk”, as Paul Klee once described, exploring how this can organically morph into forms as the composition develops. 

A large part of her art actually appears as staged compositions in interiors, a sort of still life of nature as the artist tries to focus on the recurring configurations and structures governed by a universal order. Possibly for this reason, her works have often been improperly described as surreal, despite being very far from the aesthetic strategy of shock or paradoxical juxtapositions originally explored by that movement. 

What Adamerovich’s works seem to explore, in fact, is not another alternative dimension from the reality of nature, but another level of understanding and conception of nature that grasps, somehow, silent forces and rules of balance which control its phenomenon. Yet, her work also tends to escape from any purely objective description of nature that an anthropocentric approach relying purely in science would offer.

Her work seems to suggest a secret nature, animated by its own hidden forces of light, plants, and fertile interconnections that respond to a cosmic order that often transcends human understanding, and our attempts through science to fully decode and exhaustively describe this natural wonder. 

In this sense, the work of Alicia Adamerivich is more than surreal. It is closer to a metaphysical dimension, as de Chirico once described it, namely as an attempt to find timeless forms pulling archetypes from an ancestral subconscious of images to poetically evoke and simply participate in the mystery of nature, rather than describe it. 

Despite this, the artist denies any intentional reference or inspiration from this kind of source. Interestingly but perhaps unsurprisingly, Adamerovich’s drawings sometimes echo forms and symbolic figures we could find in some rare medieval books and manuscripts of alchemy: the artist attempts to engage the secret order of things, the sublime she has been able to perceive in nature since she was a child. She does this through the physical tool of painting and its power to visualize, evoke and imagine the abstract realm, beyond the material or rational description of reality.

These considerations on her approach lead me to acknowledge some similarities with artists of the Transcendental Painting Group, such as Agnes Pelton. Adamerovich explores a spiritually heightened form of abstraction by employing free-wheeling imagery drawn from both nature, and its imprint of ancestral symbolism on a collective unconscious.

Her use of nocturnal and gloomy palettes, combined with the increasingly dramatic contrast of light and darkness, emphasise the mystery of something happening; she captures a moment suspended in time and space, allowing the viewers to simply abandon themselves in the mystery of the light radiating at different energy levels and shimmering in between the visible spectrum.

Layer after layer, the artist morphs colour with a specific mood in works which eventually deny any narrational intent: they are rather intended as “vessels of seeking”, suggesting an open-ended and plural reading of the reality that surrounds us. 

What the artist seems to encourage, in fact, is not some secret spiritual sensibility or message, but rather an alternative and heightened human experience of nature that is able to connect and capture all of its glory.

Immersed in evocative atmospheres suspended between sunrise and sunset, beginning and end, her scenes are characterized by an aura of illumination, or perhaps hallucination. In the crescendo and decrescendo of colour and light, the image ‘descends’ into the invisible, outlining an epiphany of nature that reveals itself beyond our conventionally constructed perception.

In her use of light, the artist also reveals a deep inspiration from movies, or theater, as she looks for intensified visions that try to talk to our mythopoetic perception of reality. As she explains, she also uses light as a way to create drama in the scene, turning it into a potential battlefield between contrasting forces: the bright and the dim, the static and the breathing, the crafted and organically shaped… the power of nature and flora, against an anthropocene which here seems to have been already extinct.  

Lately, Ademerovich has been exploring more audaciously with textures, sculpturally building the paintings using wax, sand and pumice on the surfaces. This recent evolution further reinforces the impression that the artist has first and foremost a plastic imprint to image-making, as she always tries to shape out the surrounding nature by identifying the essential structure and form. Pastels are the latest addition to the artist’s practice, which have allowed her to further develop a dense overlaying of colours, lights and contrasts, matter and antimatter. 

Moving across different mediums, Adamerovich succeeds in visualizing an alternative ecosystem where all things living are interconnected, united in some holistic universal order, transcending any linguistic or scientific attempt to describe and classify nature as something separate.

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