NICOLE WITTENBERG

Prince recorded the album Piano & A Microphone when he was twenty-four years old. The album is a 34-minute recording of Prince in his home studio at his own piano with a microphone. You can hear him at the beginning of the recording calling out to the sound editor to balance the relationship of the voice and the piano. Within this 34-minute cut, we can hear some of Prince’s most iconic songs move seamlessly from one to the next— beginning with 17 Days flowing right into Purple Rain and transitioning directly to a Case of You. When we think of Prince as a musician, we think of discrete movements, spanning decades, yet this album makes clear that Prince, through all of his different periods, was just one man, one artist and the vision he had for his work was continuous. This album was not released until 2018, two years after his death.

The final track is called Why the Butterflies and the entire album was continuously playing while Wittenberg painted the works for this show. The parallel is exact: each canvas made in a single take, never touched again.

This fits naturally into the practice Wittenberg has been developing from the start, built on the conviction that immediate sensation is painting’s real subject. Working first in pastel en plein air_,_ Wittenberg has developed a way of moving from the drawing to the painting without losing the momentum of the present. In this sense, the paintings are not observational, but rather the product of allowing an image, space, and encounter to endure. Wittenberg describes this as “the way things look when my eyes are closed”.

The exhibition includes paintings of various scales. For the smaller works, the method is striking, painted with a broom, the same type she uses for much larger paintings, she compresses a wall-sized gesture into something intimate, likening the experience to “dancing on a handkerchief.”

Some of the works come from the coast of Maine, where the artist has returned to for years. This landscape has become a site of accumulated knowledge held in the body. Dark Harbour 3 is a painting of a small island on a lake in Maine just after sunset, an image the artist has been engaged with for years. While the image Night Bloom, is from her friend’s apartment in Paris, the original pastel was from memory, “I was painting what I remembered of the hot summer night, three tulips just about to lose their petals. I was trying to return to a fleeting moment.” Seat of Buddha 2 was made at dusk in the mountains of Thailand. This image was a response to the Buddhist proverb: the lotus rises from the mud to become a jewel.

What can a painting do in a particular moment in time? Wittenberg has said, “that chord between what’s happening outside and what’s happening inside you is never actually cut. In uncertain times I think painters instinctively go back to nature, back to the intimate. Not for escape but for proof.” The natural world, here, is not a retreat from the turmoil of society but a way of steadying oneself within it — a place where feeling still has weight, temperature, consequence, where solid ground can still be found, and with it, affirmation.

Wittenberg has spent years moving through Southeast Asia, and Why the Butterflies is her first exhibition in the region. It is perhaps inevitable that this work, committed to the interior life of places, to what lingers in the body after the eye has moved on, is finding its moment in a city that holds multiple worlds at once. The question in the title was never meant to be answered. It was meant to be felt.

Courtesy MASSIMODECARLO.