The Brooklyn Rail

When only works on paper are presented, as they are in Joanna Pousette-Dart’s current exhibition at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, it provides an opportunity to encounter them as ends in themselves. Too often, works on paper are dismissed as merely means to an end, studies for a painting or mural, perhaps. That this is manifestly not the case here, however, does not deny the importance of correspondence, in both senses of the word: likeness and discourse. Since I have lived in Barcelona, for example, the forms of Joanna Pousette-Dart’s compositions recall Catalan Romanesque wall paintings, and this shapes my understanding of them. Indeed, the series of works on paper here, the “Mexican Suite,” foreground the experience of travel and intercultural exchange: the exhibition press release tells us that this group of works was inspired by a visit to Mexico City this last Spring.

Joanna Pousette-Dart’s paintings on panels, as opposed to the works on paper gathered here, engage with the direct material relationship of her particular image format to a wall, without, given the nonrectangular shapes and gestures with which she builds her images, the intermediary, and disengaged, rectangular shape of a manufactured paper sheet. When shifting from painting on shaped wood support to painting on sheets of watercolor paper, the curvilinear, switchback motion of color typical of the paintings on wood is released from the fixed perimeter of the panel, consequently generating options for configuration not available on a pre-shaped support. The difference between a hard, prepared surface to a soft, absorbent one is also central to this change.

The degree of transparency and opacity is determined by the potential of Pousette-Dart’s materials, and as a result the facture of the work is transformed. Absorbency, together with texture and wetness, produces a characteristic spread, mingling, resistance or flow of water-borne color released from the brush. The color often extends and blends, although sometimes when applied over a layer of dried watercolor, as is the case in the larger works here only, it will retain a sharp profile. The gesture is spontaneous or considered, usually recursive, meandering and structural—the simultaneity of repeated forms build up or challenge the developing composition, appearing as if from nowhere, both metabolized thought and recollection. The material qualities of water and pigment are at times let loose and remain uncorrected, all as in uncensored dream images.

Mexican Suite #20 (2023), is 12.25 inches square, torn from a sheet. This spatial orientation contrasts with the horizontal emphasis of all the other works on view, which are executed on whole sheets of Arches paper at 22.25 by 30 inches. In #20 there is a concentration of forms that align in the pictorial field, moving from the sense of horizon and distance encouraged by the landscape format of the other works to a closer proximity and an arboreal feel. In both cases Edvard Munch’s symbolist curvilinear circulations come to mind, as does his range of color. Blues, crimsons, deep violets, cobalts, pinks and ochre yellows cast a marine or lowering light, when colors reflect between themselves and take on a physical opticality. The doubling of forms, as well as the slow swinging lines that tack back and forth, embrace and define, merge and expand the oval shapes they travel around. The painting isn’t observational, it’s painting through both a formal modernist and an emotional, lens.

In Mexican Suite #11 (2023) the linear movement is horizontal, paradoxically both languid and taut. However, the composition ascends and descends, overlapping, and in doing so radiates shapes that push out laterally to a rounded overall perimeter set close to the papers edge, while also receding away from it in a harmonic, modulating polyphony. I found that Mexican Suite #5 (2023) stood out in particular, because only here does something like an aperture in a screen appear. Blue violet shape and line travel behind vertical gaps and are revealed against the color of the paper—from a distance it can read as collage elements. The consequences of such experimentation can be seen, in various forms, throughout all the works here. Although everything included in this exhibition is a complete statement in and of itself, one does hope that some of the pictorial problems and inventive solutions explored in these works on paper will find a way into future paintings on panel.