“Late that afternoon the atmosphere became heavy with moisture, and the setting sun was spectacularly reflected against red curtains of cloud hanging out of gray sky pierced by fragments of parallel rainbows. The kaleidoscope of luminous color changed rapidly into threatening dark clouds loaded with rain which finally towered above us in one black mass. All was in suspense waiting for the firmament to burst.” [1]
— Joy Adamson, Born Free
Slack time, the slow luminous time at dawn and dusk, has been the purview of painters since the advancement of atmospheric perspective more than a half a millennium ago. Joy Adamson’s quote of the moment, after the hillock in the heat of the Kenyan prairie, might seem opposite; however, it seemed to encapsulate the way that moisture condenses to concreteness. Even more so than Rockwell Kent’s woodcuts of Greenland and upstate New York, the essence of painting is less black and white. In keeping with paintings’ capacity to convince the viewer that pigment is light, this holds true on an international map. Cynthia Daignault’s paintings are all moisture: light in flurries, snow as it hugs the curvaceous crags of slate, quartz, and stone. Rather than Kenya, the country here is the United States, where the much-disputed nomenclature of Mount McKinley has reverted to its wonderful indigenous appellation of Denali. Her Alaskan mountains sometimes belie stillness and sedimentation after centuries of glacial shifts as snowbanks and fault lines. If Daignault’s prior switch to multi-partite painting in Light Atlas, 2014–17, is a fragmented landscape made indecipherable and abstract then 12:00, 2026, is a tan funereal dark canvas sitting atop a bank of egg-like white work. It is both object and painting. Like Wonder Lake, 2026, where a congress of light work—seemingly innocuous—allows the witnessing of the recession from the nightmare of a culled universe, rather than foisting an intrusive and plagiaristic field on the viewer.
In High on a Rocky Ledge, 2026, the search is for what is missing: human. Rather than the beguiling reduction of objects and images appearing in signs and symbols in a moving and shifting viewscape, there is a lack of a body. Without a visible population, a cut tree of the presence of civilization, the image-field evokes the dead city daguerreotypes of Henri CartierBresson. For the painting, she screen-printed a large-scale butterfly-effect of snow-flakey peak paired with 10” x 10” wildflower insets in oil.
Daignault, who calls herself a photorealist, brings to mind Linda Nochlin’s 1968 interest in the photograph and painting as a continuation of Realism’s system of values. Unlike the orthodoxy of photorealists, where portraiture and gritty urban landscapes permeate, Daignault’s approach both harks back to the nineteenth century and yet retains the contemporary nowness of the twenty-first. If Midnight Sun, 2026, is a frank white-out image of a slide then Alpenglow, 2026, signals both KodakChrome and Instagram. The filmic preoccupies Daignault, as in Twenty-Six Seconds, an unenvious “monumental meditation” of JFK’s assassination featured prominently in the Museum Contemporary Art Los Angeles exhibition Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968 (2024–25). [2]
The paintings are averse to the ubiquitous postcard even in close resemblance. Postcards are commonplace dream images of vacation spots or locales sometimes unmountable for the above-average active climber. Daignault’s new series of artworks approach the peak, Denali, as just such a weather-beaten place from afar. Museum visitors took binoculars in a fascination of the landscape paintings’ ability to transport one to Frederic Church’s Jamaica or Martin Heade’s South America. Amphibic and avian fauna in exactitude are prominent features. Based on reproducible photographs, not overly steeped in nostalgia as the chromolithographs of the nineteenth century, Daignault drew reference from recent National Park Service images of the peak.
Postcards are alloys of a golden age of painting. The postcard, a souvenir of an event, meets its challenge in the non-event of lack of travel to the site. The National Park Service provides postcards and tote bags in its locations of many different state parks.
Addressing the same subject in repetition is learning. On the scale of the spectacle of the looking, Denali, 288 panels of oil on linen, and approximately 12 feet by 24 feet becomes visible farther away than arm’s length. In a conversation with the art historian Alexander Nemerov, he says to Daignault, “I think that the journey from a sort of garden-variety skepticism and superiority as a young person to then coming to appreciate Van Gogh is not embarrassing but essential.” [3] Just as Laura Owens’ paintings on handmade wallpaper sample Vincent van Gogh, Daignault’s conceptual practice alludes to a contemporary psychic condition. Madness and isolation preoccupy Denali.
References to the Hudson River School pepper the large singular artwork as well as an aggregate format allusion to Jennifer Bartlett. If the Hudson River School and Luminism are alloys of a more traditional golden age of painting, then the postcard is its nostalgic kitsch. A souvenir of place and event; it meets its challenge in the non-event, in the lack of travel. The spectacle of the looking on site, a preoccupation of the landscape painters from both former schools, formed an equitable receivership. In the last two centuries, crowds gathered, in person, to look at Frederic Church’s work through binoculars. Daignault is not a replacement hill: she rejects the performativity of some painting. Rather than available to be seen behind a red curtain to enforce viewing as a mode and model of intersection with spectacle, Daignault envelops the viewer in a personalized relationship to details in the landscape; she collapses the hanging drapes of stage set design in Cut Piece, 2026. Without a doubt, the irenic landscape path is also familiar in its gravel, shale, and quartz (John McPhee’s A Coming Into Country details the formation of the sedimentary layers of the United States of America.) A path through a frontier and aggrandized versions of the infinitesimally small, Cut Piece removes the star figure to explore stage design. A parallel of Yoko Ono’s 1964 artwork, where the artist enacts trancelike in-personness, Daignault’s collation of different views of Denali at different points of day, the performative and anti-performative as distanced references, become the composition.
Daignault considers this new work as a departure from Light Atlas. Interstices of possibility appear on each panel. The light is scientific: gesturing to the writing of Michel Eugene Chevreul, Isaac Newton, and Goethe. The refraction of light as it approaches an object can make color seem appealing like makeup. A high blush settles on the ridges. More singular than the ubiquitously available photographs in Paris, where the café scene resists change though is in movement on the keychain or tote bag, light in science is diagrammatic. Artists such as Walker Evans rephotographed the same city street as seen in the postcards he paired with photographs he took. Lorna Simpson’s Ebony stacks and extracted collages allocate space for the reusable image. Zoe Leonard’s postcard collections of Niagara, and references to Camera Eye magazines review reproducibility as a form of total picture control. How powerful the zoomed image in its compressed smaller layout. Geoffrey Batchen’s references to the movement of prints in the nineteenth century as a pre-digital network of visual information also comes to mind. Daignault, hunkered down in Baltimore in a larger space than her old Brooklyn studio; the paintings focus the viewer to the white box broadcast space of movies. Where the circulation of information outside is an echo space for the circulation of patterned weather conditions: such as the all-encompassing snow-capped Denali tempered by these cropped scenes of wild flora and fauna. Images from different seasons, a galaxy of standard famous images of a well-known location.
The superhighway, a golden bridge of location that we identify as American despite its distance from the main landmass. The understanding of its extreme temperature, that as unconquerable land; it is a technical climb in extreme temperatures and in the arid dryness and frozen tundra. It is without the eyesore of the car dealership, instead it is a leaping off point to hop from meadow to meadow. It is peace doves beyond a burial point that could be death by plummeting, hypothermia, and in the heat—anaphylaxis. Viewing the mountain from this comfortable point conveys an extreme amount of relaxation. No sore muscles after an attempted hike. Experienced guides of many peaks, sherpas, handling huskies, dogs mushing to the peak. It is 360-degree snow cap. Rather than better known 10th Street artists, Daignault was inspired by Sydney Laurence, a regional Alaskan painter, as a source of encapsulation of the color and light show of the peak. An Aurora Borealis staked with peaked color from mid-August-to mid-April. Daignault credits Laurence’s paintings with the emotive rather than photographic images of the landscape.
Perhaps, the greatest unsaid infraction of the last few years is the renaming of Denali to Mount McKinley and back again. The karmic purse of little matter, Daignault identifies the tracks of language as understanding rather than placement. The original name, designated after the United States President, had little particular interest to local Alaskan residents. Denali was the original name of the peak, calling into memory Aleutian and other indigenous names. Daignault in her own language: “I think topicality can be a starting point, but I’m much more interested in ideas about monument, remembrance, consciousness, and our shifting experience of the natural world.” [4]
The caramel tone meets a description of a pre-Zionic land before the territorializing forces of Christian conquer made clear by its appellation. To be recognized for its commanding presence and the windswept lightness of the snow drifting off its peak is summoned in the reversion to the older name.
[1] Joy Adamson, Born Free: A Lioness of Two Worlds (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), p. 138
[2] Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, The Museum Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, November 23, 2024–May 4, 2025.
[3] Cynthia Daignault, interview by Alexander Nemerov, in Margot Norton and Jamillah James, eds., Soft Water Hard Stone, 2021 New Museum Triennial (New York: New Museum, 2021), p. 252.
[4] Daignault to Nemerov, in Norton and James, eds., Soft Water Hard Stone, p. 249.
