James Cohan is pleased to present The Mythic Age, an exhibition of new paintings and sculptural interventions by Naudline Pierre, on view from September 6 through October 19, 2024, at the gallery’s 48 Walker Street location. This is Pierre’s second solo exhibition with James Cohan. 

Transformation is the central tenet of Naudline Pierre’s practice: evolution of the self, metamorphosis of the female form, escape from our earthly existence into the luminous unknown, and material oscillations from fresco-like dry brushing to aqueous gestures. Pierre paints scenes that are ever-shifting, in states of mystery and ecstatic potentiality. Her characters’ limbs and wings extend beyond the picture plane, as if to suggest that this atmospheric world, devoid of a horizon line, continues infinitely. 

Pierre transforms and reinvigorates disparate art historical references that span centuries, pointedly looking back to artists who did not and could not imagine her as their viewer, yet share a desire to reinvent and reimagine the universe. In her newest works, Pierre references Baroque and French academic painting of the 1800s, which opened the door to modernity and the heretical embrace of iconography in the service of personal, political, and radical self-expression. She draws freely from this distinctly male, European legacy of image-making, forming an intergenerational line between artists of radically different backgrounds to refashion historical motifs for a new audience.

Pierre assumes the role of voyeur or visitor within her own constructed worlds, expanding her field of vision to introduce new characters imbued with transformative potential. This widened perspective enables Pierre to more fully embrace the physical act of painting itself, using wet-into-wet techniques to build up softer lines, sfumato clouds, and areas of great motion reminiscent of weather patterns. We see Pierre engaging in the pleasures of sheer materiality – the active process of building radiant new realms from color, light and form.

These moments of effervescence are tempered by flames as dark and sinuous as oil slicks. In cool tones of desaturated blues and grays, this recurrent motif seems to register both temperature and sensuality, at turns coyly covering and drawing attention to the figures’ nudity. Hair is rendered both as a braid of flames and as inky black tendrils whose nearly sentient, anti-gravitational upward movements remind us that we have been drawn into a space where rules of nature do not apply.