HESSE FLATOW is pleased to announce the opening of Hug, an exhibition of paintings by the Canadian-American artist Louise Belcourt, marking her first solo presentation with the gallery and her first solo in New York in over ten years.
Throughout her decades-long practice, Belcourt has developed a singular vocabulary of organic forms whose dynamic shapeshifting between the concrete and equivocal invite viewers on a journey through a chimeric landscape. An object in her studio, the memory of a lost pet, a scenic detail outside a window, all distill into amorphous shapes that are endowed with anthropomorphic dispositions and agencies. As she intuitively builds her compositions, her silhouettes reach across and touch each other to form connective links or road maps across a meditative kind of reverie.
The measured balancing act between figuration and abstraction prescribes a mode of viewing that zooms in and out of focus. Looking turns into experiencing as the distance afforded through identification collapses into an immersive, imaginative haze of fluid connotations and associations. A blush, scalloped shape morphs into flower petals, and furthermore into fingers within Belcourt’s workflow of propositions, each metaphysically eclipsed or engulfed by its successor.
For her exhibition Hug, Belcourt leans into the bodily, particularly through her use of fleshy and neutral toned palettes, as well as in the intertwining of forms whose proclivities may sway from the protective to the predatory. Her undulating contours offset what appear to be appendages with crevices, forming narrative threads of embracing arms or enclosing jaws that surround and consume. This ensnaring hold extends beyond the edges of the canvas, as Belcourt is interested less in a detached form of representation, and more in a kind of conjuring within the mind-body of the viewer.
