The Galerie Isabelle Gounod is pleased to present "POLYCHROMA " , the new exhibition by Sophie KITCHING.
Since 2018, the Franco-British artist's pictorial work has been centered around specific colors, Payne's Gray, the Invisible Green hue and more recently Emerald Green. The unique inclusions of this precious stone are also called the "garden" of the stone. This almost supernatural green, luminous and pigmented, contains such depth that it seems unreal, perhaps reminiscent of the decadent nature evoked by Joris-Karl Huysmans in " Against the Grain " (1884).
Translated into English as " Against Nature ", the main character has the desire to subvert, even supplant nature: "Nature has had its day." A nature in which Sophie Kitching multiplies sensory, sensual and aesthetic experiences, beyond the perception of the landscape.
This adoption of the artificial and aesthetic as a way of thinking has profoundly marked the work of Sophie Kitching, who lives in New York with a studio in Dumbo, one of Brooklyn's artistic centers. The city that never sleeps is indeed imbued with artificiality and reinvented nature. The night, the silence found again, are suggested by the decadent character of Huysmans who "lived hardly at all except at night, thinking that one was better off at home, more alone, and that the mind only really became excited and crackled at the nearby contact of the shadows."
In the ' Emerald Green' paintings, visions of flora emerge from a dense emerald base. No horizon line, no border, the sketched plants appear both close and far away. The colour acts here as a filter that will accentuate the illusion of depth. The shapes of petals and leaves are made up of quick brushstrokes, drips and patterns. She sometimes goes over the lines and shapes with bright pastels or dry charcoal. The use of colours that are both dynamic and dark draws us into a tonal progression, until darkness covers them.
The series ' Artifice' uses the repetition of plant accents as a pictorial process creating a lush landscape, inspired by the decorative elements of medieval tapestries and in particular the "mille-fleurs" tapestries. The canvases are tinted with Emerald, or its complementary, "Pompeian Red". Of inorganic origin, the latter decorated in particular the frescoes of Antiquity, and was born during the eruption of Vesuvius with the intense heat transforming the walls painted with yellow ochre into red ochre. The sudden metamorphosis of one shade into another is an analogy with the alchemy of painting and the subjective perception of colors.
Finally, the work ' Polychroma' consists of a photographic landscape printed in black and white and obstructed by pigmented drips and drops. By the repetition of the gesture, the accumulation of touches, the image blurs into a polychromatic field crossed by light, the landscape is revealed and illuminated.
Invited to invest the space of the Gallery, Sophie Kitching creates an in situ landscape , echoing the writings of Huysmans who evoked "his fever of the unknown, his unfulfilled ideal, his need to escape the horrible reality of existence, to cross the confines of thought, to grope without ever arriving at a certainty, in the mists of the beyond of art!"
