Solo Show by: Joan Ayrton at Galerie Florence Loewy, Paris.

The year has just begun. Joan and I are in her studio, looking at her paintings. She starts off by showing me a series of small-format works that she began to paint in 2020. Holding these canvases in her hands, she tells me that their colours are those of brackish waters, the depths of a lake. They’re viscous, sticky – and Joan in fact painted them using her fingers. More recently, the formats of her canvases have expanded. She takes these works out one by one, and looks at how they might go together: they will be featured in her next exhibition. This time, she says, the colours are sickly, a bit nauseating: greens, oranges of which there is not much left, aniseed, black. As the night is starting to fall, and the studio is dimly lit, the paintings take on an almost sinister, marshy appearance. That’s what interests me. A long time ago, I had spent time thinking about marshes. I remember a passage in the story of Jason and the Argonauts: after Jason takes the golden fleece, and the group is making its way home, the heroes run aground on the shores of Syrtis, becoming prisoners of this seemingly hostile place, their boat stranded in a layer of shallow, murky water. The silent foam of the sea surrounds them, with seaweed stretching out in all directions. There are no more animals, no more birds, nothing: the swamp extends off as far as the eye can see. Liquids and solids there invent something else entirely, as seawater mixes with the earth to form a nameless, slimy material. All hope of navigation or of return seems forever lost. Yet a protective divinity chooses to save them from these stagnant waters, and they are able to reach the sea once more. Marshes have always shifted in this way, moving between terror, anxiety and the promise of salvational fertility. Like the many forms of plant and animal life and the numerous materials to which they are home and which cohabit within them, marshes host a changeable, polymorphous imaginary that can seemingly absorb tension and conflict, transforming them.
On the painted surfaces of Joan's canvases, materials also meet without quite melding with each other. The oil lacquer is caught between a watery base and a watery surface. Joan says that the oil is trapped, but that it doesn’t allow itself to be entirely arrested or covered over: the signs that float to the surface of the canvases bear witness to that which the oil manages to emit from the depths. In other words, the surfaces remain meaningful, active and sensitive. Joan looks a great deal at layers and sub-layers, at the effects of sedimentation, at the ways in which what lies beneath speaks to us from the depths. She would likely agree with feminist researcher and physicist Karen Barad, who works in the field of science studies, amongst others, and who affirms that “matter matters”. The proof: matter leaves traces that are reflected in the canvases and that the passing of a roller never fully swallows up. It tirelessly resists, creates diversions, and refutes the heaviness of the world.
Joan has embarked upon a re-examination of painting. By enlarging her canvases as never before over the last fifteen years, she has tried to get a clearer picture of things. Her gestures have become both more precise and more vigilant: her painting now deals with the background noise of the world, the certainty that we are getting bogged down in something, in catastrophes that are imminent or else that we remember and that stir beneath our feet. In recent years, her explorations have taken her across borders, collecting fabrics and pieces of glass doors that undulate before our eyes, looking at rocks, marbling and then rocks again, clumsily handling a camera and taking care of accidents. Her investigations are, of course, far from complete, because the Earth is always moving and the news is not good. So, of course, her colours are ‘sick’.
When I first arrived at Joan’s studio, I had shown her the background screen on my phone: a 1945 painting by Janet Sobel, The Milky Way, which was featured in the Jackson Pollock exhibition at the Musée Picasso at the start of this year. Sobel was born at the end of the 19th century in a shtetl in the Ukraine, and subsequently emigrated to the United States. It was only much later in life, when she was already a grandmother, that she finally allowed herself to paint - canvases bursting with colours that would defy any attempts at categorization. Her Milky Way is soft. Bright. Swampy in its own way. Surprise: Joan had been looking at Janet’s painting that very morning. The Musée Picasso and the Galerie Florence Loewy are just a few metres apart from one another; Janet and Joan were almost neighbours. And neighbours in more ways than one: though many years separate their respective investigations, both entrust artistic explorations with the task of documenting that which makes us tremble.