The day before Janiva Ellis’s exhibition opened in Cambridge, Mass., on Jan. 31, most of her paintings weren’t done. Most of them still aren’t. In fact, that’s intentional: The 14 pieces gathered for “Fear Corroded Ape,” on view at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts through April 6, had been knocking around her studio in New York, unfinished for years, at least one since 2019.

She had continued to push and pull the pigments, scraping away with solvent and rags. She layered in mythological figures and biblical torments, fractal architecture and cavernous vaults in the desaturated hues of a Renaissance sketch. Faces piled on faces.

“Some of them are done,” she said. “Some of them are actually not done. Some of them are not done, but I’ll never work on them again.”

It’s hard to tell the difference. Ellis interweaves styles and references with internet-brained liquidity. Formally, her canvases are belabored yet raw, even the finished ones. “A lot of the lights in my paintings are just pulling the paint back so that the canvas can create the white,” she said, which suggests “an ethereal glow from within.”

The show’s premise came to her spontaneously, Ellis said. But as the idea developed, she realized, “I want to be vulnerable.” She liked that her works in progress would hang in the same building where Harvard painting students hone their craft. She thought such an exhibition might undermine art’s traditional emphasis on mastery.

Ellis, 37, had her first solo show in 2017. That exhibition, “Lick Shot” at 47 Canal gallery in Manhattan, began her career in earnest.

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