Slide
Ida Badal
February 16 - March 15, 2025

Opening Reception: Sunday, February 16th, 2-5 pm

Zodiac Pictures is thrilled to present Slide, an exhibition of new work by Ida Badal. The exhibition will be on view from February 16 - March 15, 2025. An opening reception will be held Sunday, February 16th, from 2-5 pm.

Most sensation is the edge of things 

—Jo Baer 

Like the inevitable breach between memory and matter, Ida Badal’s Slide, the artist’s debut exhibition with Zodiac Pictures, keeps a measured logic while skidding and disrupting congruency. Surfaces resembling a slow collision of decay and genesis present mossy, mired grounds sprawling out of view. Grit etches uncanny topographies stained by the discoloration of time. Through a haze, shadows gather in soft contours before dissolving into mist. The suspended terrains seem to shift focus, always either too far or too close. Their proximities almost paradoxical; they oscillate, quiver, brimful…

And then a break—seemingly from another time and place—a cut along the scene’s edge. Another void follows; crisp and impenetrable. The mysterious edged apparati signal, aim, capture the impression enclosed. The margins mimic a gesture of information without providing specifics, as if demarcating a shifting scale. A pair of convex parentheses outline a central scene, both microscopic and celestial. Alternatively, lines mark the material boundary of the painting’s surface, mirroring the medium’s four right angles.

Between the synthetic and organic, a fissure widens. The pastoral turns ominous. Through disassociated way-finding, a sign becomes a cipher; an inauspicious marking of a place unmoored and unmeasurable. Distorting the locus of reference, geometries intervene, slicing terrain and corralling rectangular reservoirs. The painting’s margins index an undisclosed standard. Logic and continuity fracture like a film strip caught between two drastically different frames, barely holding realities in place.

Combining surface qualities of pictorial, abstract, translucent, or warped, the diversely textured mediums that compose Slide assume a context-driven framework. A bench, suite of paintings, and gallery’s architecture negotiate scale and proportion as interdependent measures, each considering spatial containment through the relation of visual densities. Fleshing out tensions between volume and void, intervals are considered through lush materialities, shifting between transparency and structural delineation. 

Indexical in her use of adjacency and relationality, Badal articulates tensions between chromatic energies and spatial rhythms. Warm and cool might press against each other, resisting and amplifying one another in spectral confrontation. The resulting chromatic dissonance pulsing like an unresolved chord. The shifting temperature of natural light filters through layered residues, dispersed in varying densities. 

While some swaths maintain painterly precision, others smear and dissolve. This variance in focus, sharp against diffuse, stages a confrontation that doesn’t resolve but holds tension in suspension. Currents share a canvas yet remain estranged, their adjacency dependent on the eye for synthesis. Each paneled portal amplifying the next and igniting a sensory intensity not possible in isolation. These moments can kindle abstractions of memory; an imprint half-formed, a trace coming into register. The displaced meeting points of Badal’s project suggest both a break and a bridge, somewhere between mortality and transcendence, where (dis)integration sharpens the edge of things.

—Marie Heilich 

Ida Badal (b. 1989, White Plains, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles, CA. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union, New York in 2013. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Gray Area, Smart Objects, Los Angeles (2023); Windward, my pet ram, Santa Barbara, CA (2023); 3 and 4, 12.26 West, Los Angeles (2022). Her work has been featured in select group exhibitions at The Hole, Los Angeles; Karma, New York; VETA, Madrid, Spain; and Europa, New York.