Séance

Julie Roberts is a painter who has...obsessed herself, in one form or another, with the exixtential crisis of the human condition: The knowledge of our own mortality. "What happens when we die?" Roberts asks, but only in prelude to her real question: "How have we come to know this?" Her concern then, is in exposing the limitations of those institutions-medicine, psychology, religion, history, and even art-whose paradoxical function it is to both explain and deny death...In Séance...she has painted an eerie mise-en-scene in a suite of harmonious greens; the monochromatic striped ground repeats in the upholstery pattern of four empty chairs that surround a dinner table, on top of which sits an upturned green glass. A large white tablecloth covers the table, appearing to conceal something in its generous folds. A spirit perhaps? Or maybe just a frightened clairvoyant? The resulting bulge is made more portenous by the way it tilts two of the chairs, as if the force of its weight is about to topple them over...In all, the aura of death lurks like a phantom in the shadows; its implied violence and horror are blunted and stifled by the pedestrian detachment with which Roberts paints-and names-her images. (J. Harris, "Art Papers", Julie Roberts, September-October 1997, p. 58)