Isabella Ducrot’s Tender Paintings Bloom at Sadie Coles

Isabella Ducrot's new flower pictures are joyful things: a colourful mix of pigments, ink, paper, collage, and fabrics that are sewn, sketched, and painted onto textiles, they emanate a sense of near-astonishment at the creative possibilities of bloom and bud.

Remembering flowers is the Italian artist's second exhibition at Sadie Coles in London, and they're an apt celebration of the beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere (if you find yourself in France, Ducrot's major solo exhibition, Profusione, is on view at Le Consortium in Dijon until 8 September).

A writer and an artist, Isabella Ducrot—who, at 93, continues to work every day in her studio in a Roman palazzo—didn't start making pictures until she was in her 50s; like so many women, her duties as a wife and a mother consumed her, as did her extensive travels around the world with her husband to collect miniatures and rare textiles.

When I visited her in April this year, she explained her desire to create pictures was prompted by a combination of 'pleasure, life, and tenderness'. (Her 2021 series 'Tendernesses' comprises 20 large-scale works on paper depicting couples embracing.) 'All I have done,' she says, 'I've done a little blinded.'

At first, with no training, she approached both writing and picture-making tentatively, feeling her way forward; before long, she was fully immersed in bold experimentation. Since then, alongside publishing many volumes of brilliant, idiosyncratic short stories and essays, Ducrot's visual practice has grown from experiments in repetition—of lovers entwined, of vessels and flowers—into an inventive oeuvre that is literally and metaphorically multi-layered.

Eleven of the 17 new works on view at Sadie Coles—which are around one metre tall and 60 centimetres wide—are titled Surprise. It's easy to see why: that the centuries-old genre of still life can still offer fresh compositional challenges is, indeed, a cause for wonder. It might also be an acknowledgement that, however many times you've seen one, a flower in spring is an astonishing thing.

In arrangements in which perspective is flattened and colours heightened, each work in the show features flowers in a single vase or vases, which jostle together like tipsy friends at a party. Framed by simple, bold patterns, Ducrot's palette evokes the faded ochres and soft pinks of Italian walls, bleached pale by the sun and countered by bright flashes of vivid fuschias and lemon yellows.

The ghost of Henri Matisse hovers, who, along with Cy Twombly and Odilon Redon, Ducrot cites as important influences. However, despite the extroverted nature of her images, Ducrot's approach is subtly diaristic; in some of her compositions, she includes words and letters from her beloved late husband, Vicky.

The title of the show, with its emphasis on memory, makes clear these pictures are not simply studies of flowers; they're incursions into the past. Remembering flowers is essentially a study in intimacy: an homage to the solace of nature and to the sustained recollection that art, at its best, can elicit. —[O]

Isabella Ducrot's Remembering flowers is on view at Sadie Coles HQ, London, until 17 August 2024. Profusione is on view at Consortium Museum in Dijon, France, until 8 September 2024.