DANIELLE ORCHARD: IS IT LIGHT WHERE YOU ARE?
For her first solo exhibition at Perrotin Shanghai, and in China, Danielle Orchard revisits the history of still life to reframe female corporeal representation. Is It Light Where You Are? marks the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.
March 15 – May 25, 2024
From her Massachussetts studio, Danielle Orchard paints quietly charged, domestic scenes of solitude. If there’s an immediate sense of familiarity to her paintings, it’s because she riffs on the great modern masters: Matisse, Picasso, Hopper. But, with a disruptive brush, she assimilates their symbolism only to reclaim reality through her own contemporary lens.
Illuminating the space is a glowing oil lamp, which has been lifted from a Balthus painting. Frequently taking such art historical references as her starting point, Orchard asks, ‘what could I add to this?’. On this occasion, the flame has attracted a fragile, white moth, bringing quiet tension to the empty bed scene in which there is no dreaming muse to be found within the sheets.
On the surface, Orchard’s sitter has evaded all depiction. Yet, as the artist points out, “The female protagonist is still present” throughout the series. She appears in a framed photograph, a lipstick-stained wine glass, a red jacket. With such signs of life, it’s as if she has just stepped outside of the frame, adding mystery to the tableaux she’s left for the viewer to interpret.
The table set theatrically for two in Morning Daggers (2024) creates an eerie atmosphere. Placed on a crisp plain tablecloth are no forks, only knives, their sharp ends painted red. Is this jam or something more sinister? The viewer is left to wonder. A single, staining drop suggests there is more to this breakfast than first meets the eye.
Having developed a more metaphysical and abstracted approach for this body of work, the artist has consciously sought to invoke “sensations of the dream” by making unusual colour choices, disorienting her viewers. The loud yellow walls of a bathroom, in which the taps have been left running, contrast with a bedroom painted hot pink.
Like her subjects, Orchard is not represented directly in the frame. Freeing women from all possibilities of a voyeuristic gaze, the artist reveals more about their interior lives. Painting psychological portraits – defined by an interplay of dark and light, the real and imagined, visible and hidden – she unsettles viewers’ expectations through disquieting narratives from, and about, the female perspective.