Reviews: Hannaleah Ledwell's Rêves insolites at Galerie Popop | Anne Sophie Vallée's Visions at Galerie Laroche/Joncas

 

You don’t see a great deal of erotic art in the city, so it was a pleasant surprise to walk into Hannaleah Ledwell Rêves insolites at Galerie Popop. The works span the last few years and there is some divergence in terms of the treatment of spatialization even if the colour schemes remain consistent. These shifts don’t appear to have been linear, although there does seem to have been a gradual flattening of the surface and simplification of its texture. The earlier paintings are a bit more built up, almost sculptural in articulation, which also gives them a slightly more morbid quality. 

Rêves insolites explores the physical manifestations of love languages. Focusing on intimacy with oneself and with others, this body of work aims to convey tangible sensations, both corporeal and emotional. It is an exploration of the viscerality of touch, the softness of a caress, the vulnerability of pleasure and the chaotic mix of all these feelings at once.

The more surprising thing about them is that they look like they were painted in the late 1950s or early 1960s and this is the case wholly without any sense of strategic deliberation, in what seems to be sincerity. Why this notion of intimacy should end up having almost the same plastic language as a lot of the work that fell somewhere in the crevices between Pop and the lingering figurative expressionism of half a century ago should be the case is beyond me. But it is very different from the more performative eroticism of Mia Sandhu at Patel/Brown shown recently.

The few paintings of Ledwell's which verge on figure studies of single sitters are not quite at home amid the stretched out bodies that dominate most of the canvases, where flesh is hemmed in across the canvas, usually dismembered to accentuate its curvature against blocks of colour. This goes along with the general thrust to treat the erotic as a kind of vibrating matter that loosens or tightens the posture-type, dissected with colour used to highlight the implications of its tactile treatment.

In some of the works, the figure has the remains of an almost mechanistic armature to help give it focus and make it pop out more, but there is usually something closer to a butterflying of the figure. It never collapses totally into the ground and remains suspended on blocks of colour. The lack of clear patterning in most of the paintings gives this a more convulsive feel but it is one restrained by the tight and deliberate design.

Faces are rare, obscured or distorted, and the curves of the figures in the more deliberately legible images tend to have the sagging and winkled qualities she sometimes gives to the sheets that surround them. At the most extreme, the rippling of bodies becomes exaggerated to the point that it is reminiscent of those images of flowers that are meant to be suggestive of genitalia, only the various articulations this opens up always seem to proliferate in waves that ruin their legibility. In either case, the figure is either drifting into décor or suspended within it.

In two very different ways, the relation between the body and environment is central to the works shown in Visions at Galerie Laroche/Joncas. Featuring paintings by Frankie Gardiner and sculptures by Anne Sophie Vallée, the space is divided by soft blue and yellow into clearly delineated areas.

 

Gardiner’s small paintings in watercolour and oil are done of her rural surroundings in Massachusetts with an impressionist bent. The watercolours in particular have a condensed and refined gesturality and mild tonal shifting that allows them to be precise.

Vallée’s work sits rather oddly against these images, which register in this instance more like décor than anything else. The show relies heavily on this peculiar juxtaposition, one which works surprisingly well as a curatorial gesture, although I’m less convinced of what it does for the works of either artist on their own.

Vallée works primarily in latex, silicone, memory foam, steel etc. creating odd objects out of everyday ones. This isn’t a matter of defamiliarization (they do not become especially weird or uncanny) so much as it is of autonomizing the objects from their generic use to stress their plasticity.

There is something so austere about a work like Aménagement that one is almost tempted to project all sorts of psychodrama on it. The same could be said of Mue, with its soft violet apparently memoryless memory foam and crumpled fabric. However minimal and immediate these two works are, they suggest something neither indifferent nor inviting. There’s a sense of deliberated presence without communication. 

In some of Ledwell’s paintings there is an articulation of the body and the objects it comes in contact with. In others, this is dropped and the body registers as a kind of tactile relief, rather like the image from a heat camera. In Vallée’s sculptures, effectively the inverse of this two-pronged attack on physical space is at work. What occurs is a space that is no longer a ground or a prop. There's an unburdened innocence to it.