Installation view of Spotlight: Naudline Pierre at The FLAG Art Foundation, 2023
Photography by Steven Probert
Spotlight: Naudline Pierre
APRIL1-29, 2023
The Spotlight exhibition series includes a new or never-before-exhibited artwork accompanied by a commissioned piece of writing. It is the hope of this series to create focused and thoughtful dialogues between the visual arts and critics, poets, scholars, etc. In this iteration, the Spotlight features Naudline Pierre’s The Deepest Part, 2023, with a text by curator and writer Taylor Renee Aldridge.
On Naudline Pierre’s The Deepest Part, 2023
By Taylor Renee Aldridge
“…This opacity of gliding is chorographic philosophy, thinking on the move, over the edge, as exhaustive, imaginary mapping of an underworld and its baroque and broken surfaces. This ongoing, ruptural moment in the history of the philosophy of relation, “in which,” [Édouard] Glissant says (in a wonderful interview with [Manthia] Diawara—an excerpt, actually, from a film on Glissant that Diawara has shot that has been translated by Christopher Winks), “we try to see how humanities transform themselves,” is more and less than the same old story. It’s torqued seriality—bent, twisted, propelled off line—is occult, impossible articulation.” --Fred Moten, “to consent not to be a single being" [1]
How comfortable do you feel when you do not know? Take stock of your body when you linger in front of an artwork that does not disclose itself to you. Can you allow yourself to be guided by a sense of the somatic? Can you find grounding in that which remains concealed? Naudline Pierre’s paintings elicit an elegy to legibility. Her work renders an anti-narrative of sorts, presenting figures that petition not to be viewed as a single being. Pierre has been informed by biomythology[2], lineages of the baroque, and the potential of fabulation.
In The Deepest Part, 2023, Pierre offers an aquatic scene of several seraphic beings coalescing around one main, central figure. Corporal elements are merely suggested, as the artist imbues anatomical elements with fleshy water and fire. This much is known, and is a constant dynamic throughout the artist’s oeuvre. The eight-foot-tall composition aims to envelop the viewer into a portal of the ethereal. The celestial being at the center is a perpetual presence in much of Pierre’s work; they are often entangled, carried, or in erotic embrace with a cabal of fellow, divine sentients who are not of this world. In addition to the ways in which they engage with the main character, the accessory beings weld eyes that are equally evocative of softness as well as rigidity, peace and rage, lucidity and ambiguity. While a host of contradictions are realized in this display, they are all in harmonious alignment, despite.
The Deepest Part alludes to mythology of shadow lives and exemplifies the interior of one's subconscious world. The composition furnishes tonal greens and fluid figurative elements of water and fire, elements consistent with Pierre’s overall body of work. The central character codifies a material tension. A benevolent, light-green being, with their arm wrapped snugly around another character’s torso, who pulls them vertically, while the main figure reaches downward—into an abyss of darkness—to grab hold of celestials circling below. Pierre’s mark making is frantic: broad, swift brushstrokes embody a rage and contention that aim to be made palpable for the viewer. A serpent scythe is wielded, but it is impossible to deduce who is the antagonizer in this scene, given that all figures are in motion and contribute to some sort of attrition. The Deepest Part suggests that, perhaps all beings here have the power and possibility of antipathy, as well as goodwill. And perhaps, all exist in fruitful discord. Pierre’s painting begs consideration around anything other than singularity.
This scene and its figures, as with all those made by the artist, is slippery, errant, and wayward. A rupture occurs when looking at Pierre’s paintings, a rupture that proposes a relationship to narrative that is without prescription or didactics. And perhaps my own writing on the work violates this creed? Pierre maintains that she is simply a vessel for these figures to be made manifest. The painting then becomes a requiem for the rapturous and erotic beings that long to be materialized. Those beings, however, do not wish to be captured.
Footnotes:
[1] Moten, Fred. “to consent not to be a single being.” Poetry Foundation, Originally published February 15, 2010. Click here for the full essay.
[2] Biomythography is a literary term; it is a style of composition that weaves myth, history, and biography in epic narrative. Defined by poet Audre Lorde in her seminal piece Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (originally published in 1982) it has been known to shape theories of intersectionality and highlight the idea of internal, external, and multiple selves. (Cerritos College)
About:
Naudline Pierre (b. 1989, Leominster, MA) is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Pierre received an MFA from New York Academy of Art, NY, and a BFA from Andrews University, MI. Recent solo exhibitions include Enter the Realm, James Cohan, NY (2022); What Could Be Has Not Yet Appeared, Dallas Museum of Art, TX (2021); For I Am With You Until the End of Time, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA (2019); among others. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including So let us all be citizens too, curated by Ebony Haynes, David Zwirner, London, United Kingdom (2023); When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa (2022); Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from ICA Miami’s Collection, ICA Miami, FL (2022); In Search of the Miraculous, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2021); among others. In 2021, Pierre’s work was featured in Prospect.5 New Orleans, and was the subject of a major solo exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art. Pierre participated in the 2019–2020 Studio Museum’s Artist Residency and her work was exhibited in a three-person exhibition at MoMA PS1 as a culmination of the program. Her work belongs to the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; The Dean Collection, Macedon, NY; ICA Miami, Miami, FL; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; and the CC Foundation, Shanghai, China.
Taylor Renee Aldridge is the visual arts curator and program manager at the California African American Museum (CAAM) in Los Angeles, CA, where she has worked since 2020. Prior, Aldridge worked as a writer and independent curator in Detroit, MI. She has organized exhibitions with the Detroit Institute of Arts; Detroit Artist Market; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; and The Luminary, St. Louis, MO. In 2015, Aldridge earned an MLA from Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, with a concentration in Museum Studies; in 2011, she earned a BA from Howard University, Washington, D.C., with a concentration in Art History. In 2015, along with art critic Jessica Lynne, she co-founded ARTS.BLACK, a platform for art criticism from Black perspectives predicated on the belief that art criticism should be a tool through which we question, celebrate, and talk back to the global world of contemporary art. Aldridge is the recipient of the 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant for Short Form Writing and the 2019 Rabkin Foundation Award for Art Journalism. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, The Art Newspaper, Art21, ARTnews, Frieze, Harper's Bazaar, Canadian Art, Detroit MetroTimes, and SFMoMA’s Open Space.