Lodovico Corsini is delighted to present a solo exhibition by Daisy Sheff’s, held in our new Brussels location. Congregated as a series of works recently completed in and around the artist’s studios in Los Angeles and Inverness, northern California, All This Splish and Splash is a thriving gesture, an outward invitation into Sheff’s profoundly personal world and her equally deep iconographic well. Throughout the works, realms of reality and fairy tale, of waking and reverie, are enmeshed, and distinguishing taxonomies are reconfigured as nothing but a gentle and traversable froth. While not immediately graspable, taking time to adjust one’s eyes as if entering into a dark and velvety parlour after a day in the blazing sun, Sheff’s paintings gradually reveal objects, patterns and characters, stepping forward in turn like old friends: mermaids and their tails, milkmaids and pails, girls on stage in petticoats, sparkling jewels, bounding dancers, a dog, a fox, a clown, a cow, a table, a teapot, stone fireplaces, newborn babies and nests of squawking hatchlings.
Sheff’s work is in itself an atmosphere, unabashedly pulling from her home in California, its wildlife, its beaches, and its lore. Keeping kin with a lineage of local artists both historical and contemporary—from The Bay Area Figurative Movement to proponents of Nut Art, Sheff’s mother, Karen Barbour, and “outsider” artist Jon Serl (to whom she credits the title of the show)—Sheff builds worlds with a remarkable lifeforce using intuitive forms of image-making.
It is from this place of kinship and with a receptiveness to her vernacular landscape, culture, and ecology that Sheff surrounds herself with companions, be they animals, people, or things, loosely dealing with the laws of nature and dissolving boundaries at the behest of her painting. While mermaids constitute unfettered portraits of the self and friends in the surf, the milkmaid is her turfside companion, telling the tale of Sheff’s youth in a tiny coastal dairy town.
Water, and more specifically the Pacific, does not merely seep, splish or splash but gushes with a loud, rambunctious crash into Sheff’s paintings as ornately curled sea waves, mermaids’ tails, surfers, shells, and turtles gloss on the theme. The artist is a surfer, one touched by the feeling of boundlessness when sitting out in the ocean surrounded by water, no limits to the horizon and a terrifying and magical depth below her. It is this boundlessness and potential for abundance that Sheff brings back to her studio and paintings.
Mixing paint like a potion, Sheff conjures mottled hues, swirls and sworls of greens, browns and pinks, un-obeying tones and shades, verging on puce and fluorescence, here translucent, there solid blocks. She builds layer upon layer, blocking and superimposing, battering the darker tones at the rear of the work with brighter strokes, surfaces enlivened with sewing, glitter, beads, and heart-shaped, hole-punched cardboard. These layers and textures wreak havoc with the idea of a frame, a single moment, or defined narrative space, as every painting has at least two or three compositions lurking underneath. Sheff rotates the canvases frequently, and, if you think about it, this turning and twirling around and around creates an imaginary circle in space and time, taunting what would have been the restrictive borders of a square or a rectangle.
Sheer abundance, an unending love for material, and lack of containment become even more obvious as Sheff’s characters spiral off the canvas. Her sculptures are three-dimensional paintings, a reverse and dreamlike manifestation of how she captures life: the sculptures have fled two dimensions, yet they don’t transform into realist forms when landing in the gallery, instead keeping their painterly surfaces and their cumulative tendencies, their magnetism for layered materials, their skewed limbs and cartoonish outlines. The horse and milkmaid formally retain a link to painting through the rectangles upon which they stand, while her ceramic cat roams free.
Daisy Sheff seeks a disrupted or expanded existence, wholeheartedly expressing a desire not simply to escape into another world but to show the sublime is here, should we choose to tap into and honour it. Her works manifest a will to capture everything and the paradoxical impossibility of doing so, culminating in the joyful realisation that we can’t, because there is so much to see and live and feel and hear and smell and taste and dream, all within just a splish splash of ocean froth.
