日期
15.02.2021 | 08.05.2021
画廊
London
文件
PRESS RELEASE
FLOORPLAN
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.

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Jessie Homer French

杰西·霍默·弗伦希1940年生于纽约,现工作居住在美国加州。


她自学成才,绘画灵感来源于对周围环境的不断观察与剖析,作品揭示了艺术家对捕捉瞬间的严谨态度。朴实的用色和平静的笔触 — 看似天真又简单的画法却蕴含着艺术家精心的设计,并与死亡、自然、乡村生活之类的问题息息相关。她的画中,人性是脆弱大自然中的有害入侵物,然而,即使是描绘黑暗题材的作品,都有着一股莫名的生命力,强调艺术家苦乐参半的反田园式风格:创造力与破坏性共存。


杰西·霍默·弗伦希的作品被美国棕榈泉艺术博物馆、史密森美国艺术博物馆,以及洛杉矶当代艺术博物馆收藏