Initially, Nicole Charbonnet’s spectrally painted compositions with repeating patterns suggest the empty “zombie formalism” favored by Wall Street investors in recent years, but look again and microecosystems of words and images emerge from obscurity beneath painterly washes in works that utilize time like a tone or color.
It was a wild night of rain and wind, but family, friends and fans turned out when Jacqueline Bishop opened “The Other Landscape” and Nicole Charbonnet opened “All You Need Know” at Arthur Roger Gallery. The show is up through Dec. 26.
How do surroundings influence and contribute to the creative process? With that question in mind, ponder the powerful effect of environment on artistry shown in the current exhibition, Artist Spaces, on view at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, through Sunday, Sept. 6.
Out of the more than 400 commercial galleries were surveyed this month, more than 70% had painting shows on view. Among them are two dozen solo exhibitions by New American Paintings alumni. New Orleans native Nicole Charbonnet, who was featured in one of our earliest issues, presents new work at the venerable Arthur Roger Gallery.
As an ardent film buff, one of my all-time favorite movies I have watched repeatedly since childhood is The Wizard of Oz. So it came as a refreshing surprise to discover New Orleans artist Nicole Charbonnet’s dreamy renditions of the film as mixed media on canvas.
THERE COULD HAVE been no more beautiful sign of the ending of the solar cycle than the snow that fell in southern Louisiana that mid-December morning a few weeks ago.
Nicole Charbonet’s current body of work, entitled, The Truth about God, deals with subjects such as the temporality of the material world and the power of nature. Charbonnet portrays these thoughts in a series of canvases, all done in mixed media and acrylic. Her works are at once alarming but offer a sense of calm in their soft, fresco like appearance, reminiscent of the colors of Pompeii, muted almost to a whisper with the patina of time.
Nicole Charbonnet grew up playing hide-and-seek in the majestic, crumbling aboveground Lafayette cemetery in New Orleans. Today, she still lives in New Orleans, creating layered images on paper and canvas in which the present hides within the past like a child crouching between tombstones.
The paintings shown in this exhibition mark a new direction for Nicole Charbonnet. They provoke a different set of feelings — of sensibility even — than what we have come to associate with her work. The close-hued pastel yellows and pinks have yielded to a darker palette of greyed-blues, umbers and greens; the peeled and hollowed flower shapes that characterized an earlier, more abstract vocabulary have transmigrated to a heightened level of complexity.
With a title like Landscapes and Heroes, Nicole Charbonnet’s show at Simonne Stern might seem to suggest famous myths and legends, or at least, famous movies. Yet, while these semi-abstract works bear a passing similarity to landscapes, any actual figures, heroic or otherwise, are in scant supply. Adding to the ambiguity, most evoke old walls with faded signs or images instead of paintings in the usual sense.