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The Art of Mia Wolff: On Painting What Might Be Real

I believe that Mia Wolff is a great painter, and I feel quite certain that she has done at least two things without which no painter can be great. First, she has assimilated-not just noticed or been influenced by, but really assimilated-a huge number of visual styles, from the classic representationalism perfected by Rembrandt, through the visionary hallucinations of William Blake, to the Cubism of Picasso and Chagall and the surrealism of Salvador Dali, and much, much more (including the visual style of the superhero comic books, which she has clearly studied as intently and uncondescendingly as Roy Lichtenstein before her).

Second, out of innumerable such sources, but above all out of the mysteries of her own imagination, she has forged a visual style that encompasses great variety while always remaining unmistakably her own. Many Wolff paintings look very different from one another, but none looks as though it could have been painted by anyone else. If there is one specific quality that they all share, it is a certain oblique cognitive relationship to the real world. A Wolff painting hardly ever looks like anything you've actually seen in reality, but it doesn't present itself to you as a mere escape from or violation of reality either: more like a genuine alternative to reality, or something you might some day see in reality even though you never have yet.

This is a quality of estrangement found in much of the best science fiction, or-a closer comparison-in a certain very rare sort of very rigorous fantasy: not, by any means, the fantasy of Tolkien, but that of Angela Carter, or Samuel Delany, or China Miéville, or, for that matter, Kafka himself. Even when presented with so surreal a figure as the catwoman of Egyptian Divorce or the skeleton of Wolff and Ming Late at Night, you do not, when looking at one of Wolff's paintings, think, "This doesn't exist in my world!" You are much more likely to ask yourself, "What would have to be true of my world for this to exist in it?"

--Carl Freedman, author of Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000) and of The Incomplete Projects: Marxism, Modernity, and the Politics of Culture (2002)