“Creek Bend,” by Léni Paquet-Morante, is part of her “Extract/Abstract” exhibition at The Bainbridge House in Princeton.
The forest is an uncanny place. Even city slickers can feel it. The woods always seem to contain more than what we can see: They are home to phantoms, even if those phantoms are just the ones that haunt our imaginations when we are surrounded by trees. Many of the most famous depictions of the natural world attempt to capture that strange spirit of the countryside that speaks straight to our unconscious minds. It can be hard to find a picture of the woods that isn’t at least a little weird.
Sometimes, they’re very weird. The pieces in a current show at The Bainbridge House in Princeton straddle the line between deep-woods landscape painting and colorful abstraction. Hamilton artist Léni Paquet-Morante brings her sketchbook outdoors, but the real action is happening somewhere between her retinas, her fantasies and her brain. In “Extract/Abstract,” she has taken what she has seen in the forest, transmogrified it, re-colored it, stretched and warped it, and presented it on canvas and on paper. The result is a highly personal experience of the forest — a chronicle of one woman’s idiosyncratic impressions of nature.
Is that story legible for people who don’t happen to be Léni Paquet-Morante? Surprisingly, it is. Paintings that seem like pure plays of color and shape cohere, after an initial period of bewilderment, into detailed forest images. Part of the fun of “Extract/Abstract” is in figuring out where in the woods the artist has dropped us.
“Pebbled Shallow,” by Léni Paquet-Morante.
“Pebbled Shallow,” an acrylic piece, comes on like a scatter plot of multicolored ovals on a green field. Once deciphered (it may take you a second), it becomes a picture of a brook clear enough to provide us with a view of its stony bottom, and reflective enough to distort the mirrored images of trees on its edges.
“Winter Sky on Shallow,” in which the artist enhances her acrylic paint with ink, seems like an abstract expressionist work from a distance, with splotches of fiery orange filling the space between big, thick, deliberate strokes of paint in black and white. Give it a second or two, and you may see the late December leaves falling on fresh snow.
The horizontal “Creek Bend” is a bit more recognizable as a sylvan scene, with narrow trunks slashing diagonally across the canvas and the foreground smothered in the green of spring shoots. Yet much of the bark is rendered in baby aspirin pink, and the soft, yielding rocks and soil seem primed to slide right into the little stream that twists and flashes straight through the piece.
Curator Michael Quituisaca aids our understanding by hanging these canvases close together, inviting us to experience Paquet-Morante’s enchanted outdoors through immersion. He clearly believes that the best way to experience “Extract/Abstract” is to imagine ourselves on a rock, in a clearing, on a late autumn, blue skied day, with Paquet-Morante’s plants and brooks stretching in all directions for as far as we can see. A painting like “Ice Rings on Bear Swamp” would, in isolation, probably be understood as a play in contrast between arcs of white and blocks of rich brown. Its proximity to the rest of this forest menagerie helps it come alive in a specific time and place.
“Ice Rings on Bear Swamp,” by Léni Paquet-Morante.
With few exceptions, that place, throughout the works in this exhibition, is near a body of water. Paquet-Morante is fascinated by the way in which water distorts images and doubles the density of outdoor scenes: material reality above, tantalizing illusions below. The artist’s works give both halves of the picture — the physical world and its fluid reflection — equal weight. In Paquet-Morante’s woods, you are never really sure where the ground is, or if you are about to step into a puddle.
She gives every indication that she likes it that way, and that her vision of nature is prismatic, stretching out in directions that it shouldn’t be able to stretch. At their best, the pieces in “Extract/Abstract” capture the thrill and bewilderment of seeing a forest creek for the first time and finding yourself utterly disoriented, dislocated from the land-vs.-sea binary, transported somewhere unearthly right in the midst of the good earth.
That interest in fluidity extends to her procedural experiments. Next to the Bainbridge House gallery that contains her conventional brush-made paintings is another room with stranger, blockier, contrast-heavy canvases. Paquet-Morante’s “Flotsam” series consists of pressings of liquid paint-laden sheets of glass, and share as much with monotype prints as they do with typical acrylics. Like her paintings, they are inspired by sylvan scenes, but their energy is quite different. The flat fields of color and static backdrops introduce us to a forest unchanging.
“Flotsam on a Green Reflection,” by Léni Paquet-Morante.
This is true even when the natural world looks to be coming apart. In “Flotsam on a Green Reflection,” a tree trunk appears to be penetrated and broken in pieces by the negative space that the liquid acrylic didn’t touch. In the upper right corner, a shadow of white looks to have gotten its clutches into a knothole. This drama unfolds against a firmament of pure peach. The uniformity of the sky focuses our attention on the dynamic part of the glass-printed painting. We aren’t surrounded by the woods anymore. Here, we’re observers, recollectors, remembering certain details about our encounter with the forest and letting other ones ebb away.
Even starker is “Flotsam With Ice Raft,” in which a narrow field of white slams into a jagged wall of unyielding black. Besides that, only two colors are used: light pink (Paquet-Morante loves pink) and a swampy ocher.
Is this still the natural world we’re looking at? Or is it better understood as a nature-inspired innerscape — nature as it has imprinted itself on a single searcher’s offbeat mind? The “Flotsam” print-paintings contain many hues and shapes that aren’t often found in the forest, including fuchsia circles, pink lumps with leopard-spots, and broad fields of concrete gray. Still, it is possible to trace all of these anomalies to real-world sources, including flowers, frozen lakes, and tricks played by the sun. A few of the “Flotsam” squares have discernible waterlines; others have streaking and dripping effects that imply the presence of something wet.
Paquet-Morante’s three “Monoprint” pieces also feel close to a watery source of some kind, but these feel untethered from anything too representational. Their bottom halves feature images of small objects redolent of the forest floor like fallen leaves and sticks, while the upper halves set loose colored shapes and lines against turbulent fields of black ink. The implication is that one part of the piece has a relationship to the other, but it is hard to trace what that is.
“Composed Shallow, Leaf Litter,” by Léni Paquet-Morante.
A series of nine deft little drawings guide us back to the trail. Paquet-Morante’s ink drawings take us where her forest paths often do: right to the verdant banks of a pond. These tiny bodies of water are powerful enough to bend the air around them. In “Composed Shallow, Leaf Litter,” it is hard to tell if the little blue lake is mirroring the curves of the boughs of the trees or if the land is bending to conform to the contours of the water. Either way, the creek is the center of the world — the ribbon in the middle of the marble — and its presence gives definition and dimension to the objects around it.
In “Current at Gully Shallows,” the creek tickles the sides of a half-submerged rock, and carries the reflections of the trees and stones like twigs on the surface of a running stream. There is a wellspring somewhere in the woods that Paquet-Morante has encountered, multiplying the lines and curves of the forest and making a gentle mockery of the horizon, and while she has gone indoors to sketch it, it has never left her.
If you follow her pen, her brush, and her panes of paint-soaked glass, she can point you in its direction. Even if she is actually pointing to herself.
The Princeton University Art Museum will present “Léni Paquet-Morante: Extract/Abstract” at The Bainbridge House in Princeton through Nov. 2. Visit artmuseum.princeton.edu.
For more on Paquet-Morante, visit lenimorante.com.
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