Date
15.02.2021 | 08.05.2021
Galleria
London
File
PRESS RELEASE
OTHER
Vlcsnap 2023 06 21 15h25m03s560

MASSIMODECARLO is pleased to present West Coast, the exhibition debut of Jessie Homer French with the gallery. For her first solo exhibition with MASSIMODECARLO, London, West Coast brings together a vast range of works that encompasses a thorough investigation of the artist’s long-time practice.

Jessie Homer French is a self-taught artist whose paintings emerge from a continuous analysis of places surrounding her and reveal the artist's personal and profound attitude to a local and transient type of composition. Homer French treats with delicate care existential issues related to death and personal loss, nature and climate changing, rural life and the beauty of wide-open outdoor spaces. In her work, humankind and nature are linked by an indissoluble bond, caught in a sardonic interplay in which humanity appears as a toxic intruder in a melancholic environment.

The exhibition features nineteen works that range from the late eighties until the present day, all speaking about the lands of the Pacific Northwest and Southern California, where the artist lives and works. The paintings appear as sensitive commentaries on the places surrounding her, and the narrative element of her work is made clear by the titles placed on the recto of the canvases and plywood.

In High Country Brookies (2020) three trout rhythmically swim in a flat stream, surrounded by a pristine landscape capable of instil an enveloping peace. However, Homer French also experienced up close the devastation of her environment due to global warming and wildfires, conveyed with acute immediacy in Burning (2020) and Pine Forest Fire (2019). Earthquakes also subtly emerge in the fabric works exhibited: two embroidered maps, based on both North and South California, made of a variety of threads, paint and fabrics, showing fault lines of those areas in a very accurate way. Inspired by the places she lives, the artist thought to this series as safe artworks to hang above beds in Seismic zones. In fact, a subtle sense of humour pervades the work of Jessie Homer French, and unmissable in this regard are the shape plywood from le late eighties and early nineties showing a skunk and a possum killed by two big dogs.

Through a simplified language - only apparently naïve - flat oil colours and calm brushstrokes, Homer French enduringly observes and paints for over 40 years the world surrounding her, applying layers of storytelling and meanings on existential questions, human condition and its enigmatic relationship with nature. Even the paintings with the darkest subjects, such as the cemeteries series, feature a formal vitality capable of giving extraordinary immediacy to her bittersweet and anti-pastoral compositions, in which creation and destruction coexist with exemplary candour, and in which nature seems to live and flourish despite human interference, giving a sense of remission and hope.

Jessie Homer French Zzzd T1
Jessie Homer French

Jessie Homer French è nata a New York nel 1940. Attualmente vive e lavora a Mountain Center, in California.


Artista autodidatta, i dipinti di Homer French nascono da una continua analisi dei luoghi che la circondano e mostrano l'atteggiamento personale e profondo dell'artista nei confronti di un tipo di composizione locale e transitoria. Attraverso un linguaggio semplificato - solo apparentemente naive, colori piatti e pennellate calme - Homer French tratta con delicata attenzione temi esistenziali legati alla morte, alla natura e alla vita rurale. Nelle sue opere, l'umanità appare come un'intrusa nociva in una natura malinconica, eppure, anche i dipinti con i soggetti più cupi sono contraddistinti da una vitalità formale in grado di conferire una straordinaria immediatezza alle sue composizioni agrodolci e anti-pastorali, in cui creazione e distruzione convivono in un esemplare candore.


Le opere di Homer French sono presenti nelle collezioni del Palm Springs Art Museum di Palm Springs, dello Smithsonian American Art Museum di Washington e del Museum of Contemporary Art di Los Angeles.