Brigitte Mulholland is thrilled to present Rebecca Purdum: Presque Rien, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Paris. The show is comprised of eleven new paintings on linen and panel, each an atmosphere emitting light, shadow, and form. As John Yau has noted, her paintings “may resemble aspects of the natural world but they allude to an experience beyond language. They thwart that yearning to claim ownership by naming, which we all experience, but which can prevent us from seeing and feeling sensorially.” The exhibition’s title stems from this beautiful ambiguity and is inspired by Claude Debussy’s use of the marking ‘presque rien’ (almost nothing) on several of his scores as an instruction for the musician to play as quietly as possible. Purdum’s paintings and Debussy’s nearly silent interval have something in common: both are a momentary pause, a kind of stoppage and conflation of time, allowing one to be fully present in the moment while also simultaneously aware of something past and familiar, and awaiting something new. Each painting is its own mysterious entity, slowly revealing subtle shifts in color and texture. The experience defies words, but it is something one can palpably, inexplicably, feel.
Purdum applies paint directly with her gloved hands, rather than with brushes. This technique contributes to the ethereal quality of her images: there is the sensation that the paint has always lived on the surface of the painting, its creation akin to the mysterious phenomenon of light itself. She does not know what the final painting will look like when she begins in the studio. First, she takes whatever paint she has the most of and covers the entire surface of the canvas, then repeats this process again and again until she feels that all of her thoughts are painted through. Purdum notes that “it is finished when the painting isn’t mine anymore. It belongs to all of the elements that make up the work: color, surface, the paint itself, light and form.” She often uses sweeping rhythmic gestures as she works, with the result that the gradients of color and texture in her paintings give the sense of having been gently molded - or unearthed - by her hand into their existence.
The process of titling her work is equally intuitive. The painting Jupiter is filled with ochre earth tones and a small bright band of orange in the lower register, almost like fire embers heating the rest of the painting; it was so named after she made its final mark, a glowing red spot. Sill, the most opaque work in the exhibition, made mostly of a dark navy blue, it has a small light blue section on the bottom, which reminded the artist of what she loves about Rembrandt’s portraits: how he often used the bottom of the canvas or panel as a “window sill” with his subject resting an arm there. Painting this panel with mostly dark colors, she eventually came to rest there too with a small strip of gentle pale blue, a place to rest and gaze upon the upper shifts of color that are slowly revealed from the darkness.
Blues, oranges, yellows, and even a singular green painting populate the exhibition. The title of one work, Ripple, rather sums up the experience of looking at her work. It refers to the marks at the top of this particular painting and how they move along the entire surface. While contemplating the title, she recalled a Robert Frost poem, “For Once then Something,” in which he wrote about looking into a well: “One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple // Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom, // Blurred it, blotted it out.” Frost wasn’t sure what laid below in the depths of that well, but, much like Purdum’s own approach to her work, that ripple among the uncertainty provided a wealth of inspiration.