JOANNA POUSETTE-DART

For her seventh exhibition with Lisson Gallery, Joanna Pousette-Dart returns to her native city with a major show of new paintings, entitled ‘Centering’. Since the 1970s, when the artist began moving away from traditional rectilinear formats – initially by intertwining unstretched canvas into soft grids and then by creating shaped canvases on which to paint in the 1990s – Pousette-Dart has been utilising dynamically shaped formats to suggest the expansive, visceral, and all-encompassing qualities of landscape. From these surfaces of vertically joined curvilinear panels, she has reimagined painting as an arena of depth and breadth, creating a light and space continuum where the inner drawing is in constant dialogue with the outer shape, and everything is in perpetual motion. To further enhance the living, breathing quality of these forms and the constantly shifting and expanding worlds within worlds, the artist bevels the edges of the paintings so that they appear to float off the walls.

Pousette-Dart’s new arching and domed works further this exploration, but have a uniquely encompassing quality. Each is hand drawn and subtly asymmetrical, giving the paintings a slight list or the suggestion of spin, which sets the fields of colours and forms in motion. Each is comprised of two panels with a ‘horizon’ line that divides the space differently from one painting to another, so that the interior space of each painting has its own rise and fall or gravitational pull. Horizontal bands of colour suggest a hierarchy of distances and fluctuating qualities of light achieved through the accumulation of thinly applied layers of varying, sometimes complimentary tones. The colour modulates sometimes subtly and at other times dramatically from light to dark, or warm to cold and becomes one of the ways in which Pousette-Dart moves us though the cyclical and rotational motions inherent in each work, visually suggesting a passage from one state or realm to another. Her singular vocabulary of lines and calligraphic forms defines the orientation, as well as the sense of drama and focus of each painting, at times functioning in opposition to its internal movement and at others, echoing it.

In addition to the New Mexican vistas she been recalling and revisiting for many years, Pousette-Dart’s influences range widely from Mozarabic manuscripts and Catalan frescos to Etruscan tombs and Chinese landscape painting, to name but a few. Key to her painterly process is an intuitive approach to creating each image. She describes it as unearthing the painting’s visual and poetic logic and it involves examining a range of shifting possibilities by working through large revisions and incremental adjustments until the elements coalesce and the painting achieves its own sense of ‘presence’. For her it’s always a surprising and revelatory process and the residue of layers and gestures from various stages accrue and add richness to her images.

While suggesting a vast sense of space, her paintings are resolutely human in scale, having been shaped by her own field of vision and the physical reach of her hand. Equally important to their scale and composition is the artist’s inclusion of the viewer as integral to that experience. At the same time, these asymmetrical, vertiginous compositions suggest qualities of imminent change and realignment, so it is indeed the presence of the viewer that balances and centres the activity of each painting. And just as the artist enters into a negotiation with each work – wrestling with its internal dynamics – so too the viewer is placed front, centre and in dialogue with each painting.