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THE HOLOCAUST PAINTINGS OF NATALIE ARNOLDI

The Holocaust paintings of Natalie Arnoldi

Railroad tracks disappear into a fog bank, stretching toward a distant and dimly perceived horizon. Anything or nothing could be waiting in that fog. Natalie Arnoldi, who painted the image she calls Helix, bathed the scene in ambiguity. It’s romantic, somehow, but also unsettling. The title suits the image of parallel steel tracks as though they are a double-stranded molecule of DNA, unfurled and laid out flat and straight. The fog holds mystery and, perhaps, apprehension and anticipation in equal measure. “I think that there’s something very evocative about the railroads,” said Arnoldi, who painted a series called Roads/Trains that shows tracks and roads vanishing in the mist. “I love that people have very different reactions. For some people, it evokes a serene feeling, and for others, there’s this sense of foreboding that comes with it. I intentionally try to choose imagery that has that duality.”

Some years ago, a woman who saw the railroad paintings in Arnoldi’s studio broke down crying. For the woman, whose grandmother died at Auschwitz, the trains had a grim association that called up painful memories. The incident inspired Arnoldi to create a new body of work, This Happened Here, which runs through March at Charlotte Jackson Fine Art. The images, based on the crematoriums at the largest of the Nazi death camps, are ghostly and, in their seemingly innocuous plainness, horrifying. “The series is the first time I’m going strongly in one direction, in that I’m being intentionally disturbing,” she said.

The show is a selection of large-scale works from an ongoing series of representational paintings. “My most recent ones I’m working on are from images I took when I went and visited Poland, but the four new paintings that are in the show are based on historical photographs,” Arnoldi said. Each image bears only a month and date as a title, and in most of them, there is nothing specific in terms of the imagery to clue in the viewer as to what they depict. January 27, for instance, could be mistaken for the interior of an underground parking garage. But they do capture a despairing sense of soullessness. They are places built by man but empty of people — empty, too, of humanity.

During the Holocaust, the Auschwitz concentrationcamp complex was the site of approximately 1.1 million murders, a larger number than the deaths that occurred at the other camps. “The Allies, after liberation of each of the camps, were pretty diligent about going room to room and documenting the spaces,” she said. “I was working from these old black-andwhite photos. But I was in Poland in December and did go to see Auschwitz I. Auschwitz was actually two [main] camps. At Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Nazis destroyed the crematoriums and the gas chambers before the Russians got there. But at Auschwitz I, the gas chamber is still there, and that’s the room that I painted. I did walk into that room. And walking into a room that I had painted before visiting was a very powerful, stomach-churning experience.”

Overall, the paintings in This Happened Here derive their power from the insidious nature of the places they depict. The curved walls, enclosed spaces, locking mechanisms, dim lights, massive steel doors, and the general purpose of the steel and concrete architecture — designed so that there could be no escape — are monuments to genocide. Even without the bodies and the piles of clothing and other personal effects of the victims, they seem haunted. “A lot of artists have engaged with the Holocaust as a subject,” she said. “There’s one direction you take it in where you engage with people. Doing source-material research for the series has been really challenging on an emotional level. But there’s something about these spaces and there’s something about inhabiting a space where something has happened that I think creates a connection to that part of history. That is very different from looking at pictures of survivors or looking at victims. There’s something about the empathic connection you can create in emulating an experience of visiting a place.”

Arnoldi, who holds degrees in marine biology and ocean science, is the daughter of abstract painter Charles Arnoldi, who regularly shows at Charlotte Jackson. “I grew up around a community of abstract artists,” she said. The imagery in her previous bodies of work presents the viewer with open-ended narratives, and the indistinct imagery depicted in many of her paintings broaches the abstract and conceptual. By painting scenes of fog, smog, fireworks bursting in featureless, smoke-filled nighttime skies, and bioluminescent life forms in the dark depths of the ocean — all of them subjects of former series — she creates uncertainty. “There’s something interesting about our psychology, that if we get incomplete information, there’s this human need to fill voids to complete the picture. By creating an image that isn’t completely clear, there’s an opportunity for intellectually and emotionally engaging your audience. I give you enough information that there’s a recognizable object, whether it’s a plane, a railroad track, or a road. So it’s familiar and engaging in that way, but because the image itself isn’t completely clear and there’s this sense of an impending event — or something has just happened or is going to happen —this sort of projection of personal narrative occurs.”

But the indeterminate appearance of the paintings in This Happened Here derives from a lack of identifying markers. It’s not plain to the viewer that they depict Auschwitz. Instead of obscuring the images in mist or fog, Arnoldi masks them with mundanity. You could say that the difference between the new work and her older series is the difference between missing information and hidden information. The recent paintings may represent specific rooms gleaned from photos and visits to existing locales, but they offer no explanation, history lesson, or critique of what they depict. “This is a very charged narrative, that I’m taking on and I wanted to be respectful in the way I did that,” she said. “And part of that felt like really doing the research, looking at all the images, figuring out for me, personally, what is the most impactful way that I could represent this part of history. I felt that if I was going to take this on, it was important to read books and watch documentaries and really take this fully immersive approach to it. I tend to work very quickly and this series has been much — I don’t want to say slower — but I’ve taken much longer to decide what each painting is going to be. Part of that is because they are so emotionally challenging to work on. It’s really hard to be in the studio all day looking at the showers at Auschwitz, but, at the same time, I think that’s really important to do this series justice and really feel the gravity of what it is I’m depicting.”