Still Point, Sheila Ghidini
by Barbara Morris
Pastine Projects, San Francisco
Continuing to September 27, 2025
In a 1904 letter to fellow painter Émile Bernard, Paul Cézanne advised, “Treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone ...” Cezanne’s statement, and even more his work, with its geometric approach to a landscape defined by shifting planes, is considered foundational to the development of Cubism. Such fascination with its geometric approach to a landscape defined by shifting planes, is considered foundational to the development of Cubism. Such fascination with the geometric structure that underlies natural form is clearly an obsession shared by Sheila Ghidini.
Ghidini presents medium-scaled works on paper and a wall-mounted sculpture, each exploring the formal properties of the circle and the square. The gallery, a compact rectangular space, feels like a cube in which we have been placed, setting up an intimate relationship between the space and the formally-based artwork.
Front and rear walls each contain one large work. “Still Point No. 14” is a two-dimensional piece mounted on one side. Opposite this is the sculptural work, “Things which are equal to the Thing are equal to one another.” Side walls each present a trio of works on paper, and opposite, nine square pieces arranged in a grid. The large grid is complex and visually engaging, each element consisting of a nested composition of circles and squares either located around the central axis or in a more asymmetrical arrangement. Rays emerge from the center, dividing the circles into smaller pie-shaped sections, the squares into smaller squares and triangles. The center of each work is a small circle, usually dark, surrounded by concentric rings in tones or muted colors carefully described by a thicket of cross-hatching.
The warm, gold-toned “Still Point No. 5” features symmetrical geometry arranged around the central axis. Converging rays create an illusion of space; after being drawn into this deeper space, the eye bounces back out and around the smaller areas, finding darkly shaded areas to rest in, then attracted by the lighter and more reflective hues. Ghidini’s palette and materials are elegant and austere, with an emphasis on graphite and a tonal range of grays. Subtle colors include reds tending to orange or pink, purples, ultramarine blue, bits of yellow, patches of earth tones, and metallic sheens of silver and gold.
The measured format and subdued tones of the work shift our perception toward a close inspection of its content. Sustained viewing reveals subtle but striking variations in mark-making and rhythm. The precise, regular hatch marks of the pencil contrast with looser areas in which ink is brushed over the graphite. The infinite variations in opacity work well, as does the contrast of edges that may end abruptly, cut off at a pencil line, or roughly, feathering off into lightly covered areas that suggest the ink is spontaneously running out.
Ghidini, who has met with serious health challenges in recent years, has shifted mental gears to confront and accept that things are often beyond her control, as reflected in her embrace of greater randomness within the work.
Earlier in her career, Ghidini employed representational imagery, chairs and nests in particular; these have all but vanished. “Still Point No. 9” contains a small area of collage, with small white objects resembling furniture, and her sculpture uses disassembled chair parts. This work, while explicitly formal — displaying the cone, sphere, and cube in literal fashion — has a playful quality to it unlike the two-dimensional works. Behind the work itself, the artist has drawn a cast shadow, its relationship with the actual shadows amounting to a visual poem.
In those earlier drawings of chairs the meticulously rendered quasi-architectural objects described an abstract space, flipping upside-down or sideways. Their dizzying and contorted disruptions of space shared an aesthetic with that of illusionist M.C. Escher. With the “Still Point” series the pyrotechnics of perspective have given way to a quieter, more reflective space, still shifting us into disparate visual arenas, areas of interest appearing near or far, yet all within a unified metaphysical atmosphere. The simple yet broken forms reflect the wholeness and fragmentation that comprise the cycles of life.
If the chair, evocative of the body, both its presence and absence, suggests a domestic space, the formal shapes of circle and cube are more suggestive of the mind, of the world of relationships between abstraction and the spirit. A circle may signify the oneness of all things, while the square presents a mathematical foundation suggesting the geometric structure of matter. Ghidini's recent work suggests a hypnotic dance, a pulse that reminds us that there is much more to our physical world than meets the eye.
