Janaina Tschäpe at Bastide Projects

Artist: Janaina Tschäpe

Exhibition title: Halbschatten

Venue: Bastide Projects, Marseille, France

Date: June 27 – September 2, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Bastide Projects, Marseille

Halbschatten (Penumbra) brings together Janaina Tschäpe’s works on canvas and paper in which light and darkness interact through two approaches to painting.

In line with her previous work (Morning Light, Wasserspiegel, Juju in the Swamp), the artist’s painting arises from an experience of nature that expands to express atmospheric landscapes. Janaina Tschäpe explores the sensations of her own memory to materialise her remembered experience of nature, and the emotion of converting it to gestures.

This gives rise to monumental gestural painting, whereby casein is applied in successive layers on a canvas, where luxuriant and delicate shapes are drawn in pencil. These superimposed layers create transparent units, infiltrated by drawing, allowing us to perceive the micro-events, flow of emotions and times of the act of remembering. Equally, a unified environment comes from the interaction of shapes, and a scene occurs. Thus the experience of light is offered to the viewer, the light of a dazzling morning or the light one senses in the dark, refracted light that spreads and gives of itself. From these effects grow impressions of weightlessness and weight, or humidity.

Janaina Tschäpe’s recent works (White Light V, Study I, Study II) mark the evolution of her practice to-wards a more conceptual approach, in which she begins to be interested in white paint. The techniques she had used up until then are reversed, the drawings are created first and the paint is applied over the embryonic pencil shape.The paint has now become an active medium, taking on colour and spreading it across canvas or paper to reveal its differences. This is done in pursuit of the idea of painting with the colour white, and aside from the light that it emits, it perhaps recalls the artist’s previous works in that it views painting as an event.