Bernadette Despujol - Exquisite Cuerpo at Rachel Uffner Gallery through June 29, 2024
Rachel Uffner may have one of the most beautiful gallery spaces in New York. In the back room there’s a gorgeous skylight slotted between old wooden rafters, which (on a clear day) frames the bright blue sky like a James Turrell installation. As the home of Bernadette Despujol’s exhibition Exquisite Cuerpo, composed of paintings depicting her extended family in tropical Miami, the ceiling feels like a rainforest canopy, letting in light as if through holes in a web of overhanging branches and clouds.Â
The exhibition text compares Despujol’s style to Lucien Freud and Alice Neel, but the influence of Van Gogh was far more noticeable to my eye, which receives no mention at all. (One painting even includes his signature wicker chair.) Like Van Gogh, Despujol uses the same fluttering brushwork on people's skin as she does on leaves and grass, creating an aesthetic continuity between humans and plants. In one painting, a man’s feet twist into the ground like knobs on a tree root. In a self-portrait, the pregnant artist’s green eyes mirror the surrounding fauna, and her arms are so tan they could be mistaken for tree branches. Perhaps she wants us to believe that a child is not the only thing that could grow out of this painting—her nipples are marked with thick globs of paint that protrude half an inch off the surface of the canvas, like a seedling beginning to sprout. The painting Cujà de JardÃn is the most obvious effort to collapse the distance between nature and humans, portraying a small child dressed like a sunflower (another Van Gogh reference) with petals poking out from all sides of her head. There’s a palpable spirit or pulse that flows from nature into humans and animals and then back again. In another full-body self-portrait of the pregnant artist, she lies in an almost fetal position holding a shepherd’s staff, blurring the distinction between mother and child—leader and follower—god and mortal. Fertility, representing the circle of life, is synonymous with the passage of time.Â
Despite a sense of synthesis with nature, there’s a marked atmosphere of distress that overhangs the exhibition. Her work celebrates birth, life, and family, but under siege—by (I can only imagine) climate change, declining birth rates, as well as growing atomization and individualism. Andres En La Ducha depicts a man, naked, seated, and holding his knees on the floor of a red-tiled shower, from which large droplets slowly descend upon him. His outdoor shower is picturesque enough, but that’s not sufficient to console the defeated and worn out look on his face. Coromoto Con Perros y Botuto shows a baby sitting on a pile of sand surrounded by saplings. There’s a cinderblock wall in the background and two dogs to keep the baby company, one of which has swollen nipples, carved into thick pink paint with the back of a brush—a nod to Rome’s mythical origin story, where its founders, Romulus and Remus, were raised by wolves. Was the baby left in the wild to fend for herself? Will nature protect her? Or does she have to protect nature? Her face is filled with contradicting brushstrokes that make it seem like she is turning her head both ways at once, and she raises one eyebrow as if evaluating her circumstances with a more mature consciousness than one would expect to find in a one-year-old. La Bruja y La Princesa (the Witch and the Princess) portrays two children, one wearing a witch’s tall pointy hat and one wearing a hairband with red devil-horns poking out, as if to suggest that children need to defend themselves from impending doom through spiritual wrangling and sorcery.Â
The most hopeful painting in the exhibition is of a grandmother and two grandchildren—one, just a baby, in her lap and the other, maybe five years old, standing beside her. The grandmother is one of the only people depicted without concern or despair. She stares at the viewer with a stolid expression, clutching the baby with her hands. She and her older granddaughter wear the same white beaded necklace, which Despujols depicts with thick dabs of white paint. In the background, there’s an ominous chain-link fence interspersed with tall daisies. Between this painting, the many others of children, families, and pregnancy, Despujols stakes our hope for the future on the fact that life has persisted (so far) generation after generation. It’s just not clear whether the same folk wisdom and intuition that guided our forebears will be of much use this time around.Â
Thank you for reading, and many thanks to my wonderful editor, Emma Schneider :)
These are all great pieces but I thought this claim was a bit guilty of the same stretching you tease museum gallery texts for: "In another full-body self-portrait of the pregnant artist, she lies in an almost fetal position holding a shepherd’s staff, blurring the distinction between mother and child—leader and follower—god and mortal." I find the hypothetical questions you pose toward a piece or the clever remarks you make about a piece much more engaging than the sparknotes style of summary-writing you sometimes do. [my 3 cents about this jawn].