AMÉLIE JÉRÔME | CORRESPONDANCES

Galerie Laroche/Joncas is very happy to present Correspondances, an exhibition of paintings by Amélie Jérôme. This is the first solo exhibition by Amélie with the gallery.

CORRESPONDENCES (AND ESTRANGEMENTS)
—“[I]nasmuch as man is composed of earth, water, air and fire, his body resembles that of the earth; and as man has in him bones the support and framework of his flesh, the world has its rocks the supports of the earth; as man has in him a pool of blood in which the lungs rise and fall in breathing, so the body of the earth has its ocean tide which likewise rises and falls every six hours, as if the world breathed” (Leonardo, Notes)

—“If nature originally created man, man in turn takes over the creative process and makes of himself something unearthly.” (Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests)

In Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondences,” nature is a temple that kindles the differentiated senses: “Perfumes, colors, and sounds respond to one another,” allowing us to recover an original perception of oneness. The now-archaic idea that forests and mountaintops divulge a primordial harmony we have lost is itself lost to us. Our post-organic, commodified present would seem to leave no room for pristine thoughts of nature. Because we have created these romantic myths, what prevents us from beholding nature as a concept of our own making?

The mists, eddies, rock strata, and skeins of cloud evoked by Amélie Jérôme’s paintings make us face a different aspect of nature, one that is experienced voicelessly in its obdurate elements. Here nature is a generative power, an engine of construction that sweeps us into its turbulent activity. It is at once remote from human hands and tangled up in human agency. Jérôme’s moving images never settle into distinct objects we can quantify, frame, or possess. Instead, her ambient forms give us a fleeting glimpse of forces of transformation, such as flow, erosion, and chemical reaction. Ordinary sense perception, too, undergoes a metamorphosis as these ambiguous “places” forego most landscape references and associations with habitability. They shed their human connotations, drawing our attention to other relationships we may have with them.

The way we see our own matter mingling with the wider world shows that we never exited from nature once and for all. These paintings stage an ongoing correspondence between our own composite bodies and the wider ecology. The analogies they reveal may remind of the mineral origins of human life, but this past also hints at future possibilities of connection and commitment. While our former relationship to the natural world remains an awkward and polarized one, marked by a history of idolizing, degrading, and destroying, these paintings ask us to dwell at length in other, more mixed feelings of joy, anxiety, and reverence. They welcome a new nature, conceived through an ongoing process of contact and combination.