CHANTAL JOFFE

As Laing notes in their essay, Losing Time Again, ‘the paintings that comprise The Dog’s Birthday are concerned with time, especially lost time and the possibilities of time’s recovery that art presents. As the bathetic title suggests, they are focused on ordinary domestic activities—ironing, reading, washing, eating—and small festivities, a plethora of ways of passing and marking time. Time has been spent logging what would otherwise be casual moments, haphazard and unstaged. People loiter about or play with their phones, take baths, gather around a cake, cuddle a dog. It’s exactly the cargo contained in almost anybody’s iPhone library, a log of days.’

There is a particularly French precedent to art that focuses so intensely on the domestic and the quotidian, from Bonnard’s baths to Vuillard’s intimiste interiors. ‘I made this show,’ Joffe says, ‘thinking about Paris—about Vuillard in particular and how he painted in apartments his family lived in, and how the family dramas play out against the changing wallpaper and the newspaper reading of the everyday—and how for him colour is tone and tone is everything.’

At the same time, the paintings in The Dog’s Birthday are freighted with a curious unease, a desire to stop time in its tracks, to freeze the frame on even the most inconsequential moment or ordinary scene. The works were made in the long shadow of grief, in the wake of a series of family bereavements. One might think again of Vuillard, and of a painting like At Table (1893), with its cast of mourning sisters at a cluttered table. But Joffe’s paintings are equally preoccupied with literature, and especially the work of Marcel Proust. Appropriately for a Paris show, the book that Joffe is reading in several of her self-portraits, including Reading in Bed (2025), is In Search of Lost Time, Proust’s mammoth meditation on time and loss, and the complex mediatory role of memory in navigating grief and change.

To quote from Laing’s essay again, ‘Time is not totally lost when it has passed into the past, so long as it can be recalled. Any event, any moment can be summoned back. But the potentially recoverable nature of past time has to be set against its plasticity, the way it is redrawn and recoloured by the changes in perspective, context, awareness that occur as the individual is drawn inexorably along the tracks of chronological time.’ In these extraordinary paintings, there is an accommodation between the desire to cling to time and the possibilities that art offers to experiment imaginatively with loss and leaving.