Katelyn Eichwald, Hypnosis, 2024, oil on linen (Courtesy of the artist and Fortnight Institute, New York; Photo: Jason Mandella)

Until dashing into Katelyn Eichwald’s solo show Talisman at Fortnight Institute to avoid standing in a downpour like an asshole outside of the opening of La MaMa Galleria’s Every Woman Biennial, I would have firmly declared myself anti-poetry in galleries (apart from readings or performances, of course). The poetry creep has been a long time coming. First, it was poems as press releases, a grating form of promotion that somehow out-snoots impenetrable jargon-heavy artspeak in audience alienation. Then, it was the more recent phenomenon, which I saw twice on a trip to Chelsea a few months back: displaying poems on gallery walls in vinyl as if they were visual art pieces. While this choice made sense for Cole Lu whose poem hovered near Lu’s visual art in Tina Kim’s group show Revolt of the Body, Ama Codjoe’s wall-mounted poem in Hauser & Wirth’s The Flesh of the Earth irked me. As if the shoes-off-on-the-rug, tune-in, drop-out empty psychedelia of Pipilotti Rist’s show downstairs could not get any more pretentious.

Well, I take it all back—or some of it. Eichwald’s paintings, monomaniacally focused on minute accessories—necklaces, earrings, belt buckles, lip rings, shoes, a gigantic bow—like a dramatic cinematic closeup, come with a skinny and easily overlooked light pink takeaway sheet printed with short vaguely narrative poems. At least “poems” is how the Saturday gallery attendant described them, so I’m going to go with it. What else would you call them? (Extremely) short stories? Spells? Each piece of writing corresponds to a specific work in the show. Despite their notable brevity at only a few sentences long (if that), the texts shift, augment, and sometimes even change completely the understanding of the paintings, weaving imaginative and often spooky narratives while grounded in deceptively mundane visual details.

Katelyn Eichwald, Blood Magic, 2023, oil on hemp (Courtesy of the artist and Fortnight Institute, New York; Photo: Jason Mandella)

Take, for instance, the first work I approached in the show, Blood Magic, which features an ornate ruby-red jeweled necklace resting on …ahem…generous cleavage. While the large pendant necklace seems like a sartorial anachronism, more fitting for classical portraiture hung in the Met than in an East Village gallery in 2024, the corresponding text adds a hefty dose of the macabre: “The back of the jewel has a small hole, almost invisible, that opens with a touch. One drop in a cup of tea is tasteless and quick.” Oh! I love a good poisoning, don’t you?

Not every narrative is so overtly menacing though. I may actually prefer the confoundingly creepy Distortion. The painting solely zeroes in on an ear hung with a spiraled earring, the shadow of which bounces off the sitter’s exposed neck. A simple scene, no? Well, with a glance down at the paper, not quite: “He was on his way to work when his son called, ‘Dad, I’m in jail. Come get me. I’m so sorry.’ But it wasn’t his son, and he wasn’t sorry.” What?! Whatever is happening, it’s not good.

Katelyn Eichwald, Shapeshifting, 2024, oil on hemp (Courtesy of the artist and Fortnight Institute, New York; Photo: Jason Mandella)

Others have even less of a narrative as seen in the one-sentencer for Rebirth, portraying a delightfully trashy chest butterfly tattoo. “Six hundred and twelve lives so far, and each one has ended like this.” Yikes! Not exactly Lana Del Rey’s “Happiness is a butterfly”! And I’d be remiss if I misrepresented all of the writing as gnawingly ominous. Eichwald also provides a gift for the horse girls and boys out there with some uplifting Orville Peck-esque cowboy bronco fantasies, painting a large belt buckle of a horse looped through denim and a tucked-in button-down shirt. Entitled Shapeshifting, its corresponding text reads, “When he’s a man, he has man thoughts. When he’s a horse, he has horse thoughts. There is no overlap between the two, except in the brief moment when he’s shifting, and occasionally in his dreams.” A yee-haw Animorphs!

While I’m overtly giving into my lexophile leanings, this isn’t to say that Eichwald’s paintings don’t stand on their own sans text. Formally, Eichwald utilizes the roughness of her materials, frequently oil on jute or hemp, which adds a fascinating tactile quality to the works. These are not your typical effortlessly smooth primed oil paintings. Instead, they beg for a caress, a yearning to stroke these objects, rub them, like you do, as the show’s title references, talismans. The artist’s chosen subjects too are so ambiguous that they add an air of mystery: abandoned see-through white gloves lay on the ground, a girl turns away, showing only the oversized pink bow tied to her hair, turquoise mascara surrounding a Black woman’s eyes draw your eyes into hers, a jeweled headband catches the light, adding a bit of shine, and a pale, disembodied hand, with prominent greenish veins, floats into an expanse of black. Under each work, Eichwald places an engraved brass plate of the works’ titles—equally eerie as the longer writing—Lethal Touch, Omniscience, Hypnosis, Telepathy, Necromancy.

Installation view of Katelyn Eichwald’s Talisman, 2024, at Fortnight Institute (Courtesy of the artist and Fortnight Institute, New York; Photo: Jason Mandella)

Clearly, from the titles to the show’s name, there is a witchy element here. In fact, Omniscience’s text (“She hasn’t yet found the limit of what she knows. She reaches out wearily in the dark, thinking maybe she’s finally done, maybe now she can rest. But there’s always something there”) reminds me of the title of Chelsea Wolfe’s equally witchy new album She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She. Eichwald is no stranger to the unsettling either. Her first exhibition at Fortnight Institute, 2018’s Good Boy, included paintings of post-blood-splatter (or post-serious wine spillage) housekeeping in Clean Up and flooding fright in the form of an overflowing tap in Kitchen Sink. While the trepidation is right there on the canvas in her earlier work, Talisman trades overt dread for subtle mysticism that can be whimsical and threatening in equal measure. These aren’t all your everyday talismans, though the necklace in Possession does seem to include an evil eye if you squint at it long enough. There are also personal items that become imbued with meaning through both the imagery and the text such as Dad’s worn brown loafers in Levitation. Though one singular talisman per painting, Eichwald’s show has a resonance with Clarity Haynes’s series of Altars, highly personal self-and-other portraits through treasured stuff.

Perhaps it’s the presence of a necromancer or just the press release’s final question hinting at curses, but Eichwald’s show and writing remind me of Reuben Dendinger’s appropriately titled Cursed Images, a collection of horror short stories published last year by Hyperidean Press. From a “ghoulish” evil art exhibition to a diagnosis of Social Collapse Anxiety Disorder with the only cure being a Big Pharma product made out of ants with hallucinogenic properties to train fetish art leading a man to pure insanity, Dendinger’s horror is firmly planted in the only slightly exaggerated (sur)reality of late-stage capitalism. Yet, what makes Dendinger’s stories so captivating is his writing, grounding his stories in moments of moral ambiguity, vagueness, and sometimes downright flippancy. All of which seem to relate to Eichwald’s own. Take, for instance, a moment from the story “The Necromancer’s Driver” when the protagonist shifts from morbidly collecting skulls to becoming an assistant to a necromancer (with some deader skin harvesting in between). Describing his duties, which almost entirely amount to driving a necromancer around, the narrator says, “For whatever reason, the necromancer’s procedures had to be carried out in a moving vehicle. I never understood why, and never asked.” The lack of curiosity on the narrator’s part leaves us as readers equally in the dark, questioning what exactly is happening and what is imagined by the narrator.

Katelyn Eichwald, Necromancy, 2024, oil on linen (Courtesy of the artist and Fortnight Institute, New York; Photo: Jason Mandella)

Both Eichwald and Dendinger make the most out of what isn’t seen, what isn’t acknowledged, and what the viewer and/or reader fill in for themselves. Is the Jay Leno denim-suited person wearing the A belt in Anarchy really a doomsday prepper who should be on suicide watch? Is the man in the tuxedo in Rage really almost burning down the house with a forgotten pot on the stove or does that reference to a “black eye” hint at physical violence? And what do we really deserve with the repeated, “You deserve it-you deserve it-you deserve it” in Hypnosis while staring into those greenish-blue framed eyes? Is it pleasure? Pain? A reminder of bad makeup decisions made before middle school dances?

Of course, I don’t know and maybe Eichwald doesn’t either. But it’s this unfolding uncertainty that makes Talisman, even while juggling from the checklist to the pink poem paper to the art on the wall and back again, an especially engrossing way to engage with art. As David Lynch would say, it kept the mystery alive and, “That’s the most beautiful thing.”