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Joanne Robertson‘s paintings emerge through a process that is held in constant permutation, a sensibility which carries across into her music, composed of drifting melodies on guitar. Across her canvases, loose swathes of colour accumulate, intimating both the landscapes she moves through and the interior states they solicit. It is in this shifting field that her new solo exhibition Bathtub, her second at Edouard Montassut gallery, situates itself. Comprising a suite of five new large-scale paintings, the exhibition extends a lineage in which the tradition of landscape painting is continuously reworked—from the Post-Impressionists to Joan Mitchell—where colour is used as a structural device in an expanded exploration of painting.
This engagement with the genre of landscape painting begins in the works’ titles themselves— Hot Lake, Flower-pattern Guitar Case, Collage Boat, Reed—which conjure a languid déjeuner sur l’herbe, set within a verdant terrain, held in the suspended heat of a midsummer day. This latent landscape further extends into the exhibition’s spatial logic. Resisting a more traditional mode of display, the works are installed across the gallery space as a single environment. Four paintings— Flower-pattern Guitar Case, One Shoot, Collage Boat, and Reed— are compressed in the far corner, their adjacency suggesting a continuous, unfolding setting. They assume an almost cinematic quality, like a shifting panorama set in motion, each canvas functioning as a fragment from an oneiric travelogue, recalling Chris Marker’s drifting, essayistic use of the camera.
Across their surfaces, a play of thick and more fugitive brushstrokes evoke form and movement. Turbulent blues suggest churning seas, while greens fracture into wind-swept foliage, driven by unstable gestures. Elsewhere, landmasses gather into dense chromatic fields of yellow, purple, and blue, hovering on the brink of dissolution. At the opposite end of the gallery, a single painting, Hot Lake, hangs awkwardly, partially obstructing the doorway. Its mass of green, pink and blue paint reads as a distant yet steady horizon, both anchoring and disrupting the space. Even here, stability feels provisional, as if representation might give way at any moment.
Within Robertson’s pictorial language, meaning too remains in flux, continually edging toward metamorphosis. Gradually, the landscape begins to shift toward the bodily, through variations in scale, form and structure. The figures oscillate between dissolution and restraint, at times seeping into the space they inhabit, at others, arrested in their movements. The image of a bathtub, which lends the exhibition its title, begins to cast a quiet undertow across the series. One might recall the intimate bath scenes by Pierre Bonnard from the early 20th century, where the domestic slips toward something more ambiguous, even ominous, as the tub starts to resemble a coffin, enclosing the body it contains.
It is within this slippage that the exhibition finds its resolution, in which landscape and figuration continually fold into one another, releasing a range of affective densities. In this process, a shifting rhythm of proximity and distance moves through the works presented, softly displacing the viewer in the space. Painting exceeds its surface, assuming an embodied presence that is sensed as much as it is seen.
Juliette Desorgues