Jasmine Gregory at Capc Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux

For this exhibition, Jasmine Grégory proposes to deconstruct her relationship with painting. Painting appears in various states, multiplying the points of view from which this historically charged medium can be approached. Objects are placed in display cases; light effects make them appear and disappear; they spread out onto walls to become architecture. These are all gestures that invite us to move around and look at painting in a different way. Grégory specifically uses paintings of advertisements to explore themes relating to value-making. Another facet of her art explores the erasure of Black experiences and lives. Based on the work of Afro-pessimist philosopher Calvin L. Warren, the artist addresses issues focusing on existence and being.

In her work, Jasmine Gregory seeks to go to the margins of painting. She uses leftovers, waste and scraps of paint and exhibits them. And so painting bleeds out beyond the frame (of both the canvas and the exhibition), it spreads, disgustingly, spilling out, beyond the confines of its proper place, all the better to question its own ultimate destiny, finitude and death. Just as figures in pop culture, such as Lana Del Rey, are objects of fantasy, elevated to icon status, Jasmine Gregory examines what is left of the icon once it has been reduced to a mere carcass. Fully aware of living in times that she feels are the debris of a world that is already dead, she embraces painting in this critical dimension – this art history medium par excellence, celebrated, declared dead and resuscitated countless times. Worn out, manipulated, consigned to patriarchal capitalist history, all that is left, as with the USA, is a deathly memory that she twists to the point of exhaustion.

But instead of resigning herself to an apparently ineluctable destiny, Jasmine Gregory speaks the language of collage, a strange assemblage of references to late capitalism, an end of art, in order to transform it. Here, painting is variously deconstructed, dramatised in some exhibition rooms as if to evoke tragedy, or on the contrary overexposed beneath ultra-white light as if under clinical examination. Painting that is initially too empty, then too full, loaded with signs that are immediately deleted.

This exhibition is produced with the Centre culturel suisse On Tour as part of its itinerant programme, whilst its building is being renovated in Paris.