Curator Sabrina Andres invited me to participate in this four-person exhibition with three of my oil paintings at Tube Culture Hall in Milan.
These works continue the themes of freedom-seeking, shadow work and black self-expression, and directly reference Matisse’s masterpiece Bonheur de Vivre (Joy of Life). I pulled the titles from Baldwin’s classic fiction story Come Out the Wilderness about a Black woman’s futile attempts at controlling her future, and used the themes addressed in the writing as a catalyst for alternative narratives in my paintings.
From the press release,
SOMEWHERE IN TIME celebrates each artists’ curiosity and exploration into both the personal and historical elements that are often present in the medium of painting. The exhibition title refers to a place in time, without saying where and when. The agency of this show is to transcend the fixed realities of time by fusing the past and the present into a single dimension.
For this occasion each participating artist has carefully chosen a masterwork as a point of departure for new dialogues to be had. These works span from early renaissance, baroque, and modernism, covering some of the most important époques of art history.
Through playful re-investigation of shape, color, proportion, composition and storyline, the artists’ shared interest in nature, psychology and mythology is newly explored.
The resulting paintings in SOMEWHERE IN TIME reference masterpieces by Piero della Francesca, Peter Paul Rubens, Ferdinand Hodler and Henri Matisse, encouraging viewers to critically engage with their pre-existing ideas about the acclaimed paintings in unexpected news ways.
SOMEWHERE IN TIME shares insight into each artists’ psyche, and reveals the dualities that inspire their artwork ranging from the real vs. surreal, spirituality vs. bodily, Arcadian vs. urban, and subconscious vs. conscious. Dreamy symbols like flowers, skulls, lush lawns, and fantastical female figures are juxtaposed with ethereal abstract gestures. Together they behave like a pendulum: when one sphere is lifted and released, it strikes all the consecutive spheres, moving energy swiftly from the past to the present, and onward.