09.09 - 03.10.2020
A solo exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Jeanne Hoffman
In To make a landscape fit indoors, I draw collected impressions back into the space of painting. Normally, when preparing for a show, I would drift between various mediums setting up relationships between things, but the constraints of lockdown required a strategy of turning inward. It necessitated the use of whatever was at hand. I returned to collage: Collecting fragments of whatever caught my eye, and assembling them into arrangements that obediently fit within the edges of a page. The processes of cutting and arranging became a kind of gardening of fragments.
In transferring the collage references into the field of painting, the metaphor of the garden became the guiding principle. I worked from multiple perspectives, zooming in and out of the constructed landscapes, shifting focus between textures from up close to more distant views, often in the same work. Frames and borders became important: the idea of a device that separates inside and outside.
At times, I stayed quite close to legible references in the collages. These material borrowings serve to engage in an interplay between physical objects and their relation to the poetic objects of the imagination. Their peripheral presences pointing to relational meanings of the interdependent dualities of becoming/disintegrating, inside/outside and room/object. These considerations are similarly described in the frames within frames of paintings, which interrogate the limits of the object and the room/object border.
Gardening has to do with observing change. A garden is at once completely still and continually changing: continuous movement and accumulated object. It speaks of the tension between motion and stillness inherent in assemblage – the process of being formed, of “becoming”, which inhabits relationships between discrete elements of the work. In "becoming", one piece is drawn into the territory of another, changing its value as an element and bringing about an unexpected unity. Deleuze would say, the life of the work is in the “intermezzo”.
- Jeanne Hoffmann, September 2020, Cape Town
