ANNIE HÉMOND HOTTE : Nights

Marvin Gardens is pleased to present Nights, Brooklyn based painter Annie Hémond Hotte’s first solo show in New York. Known for her folkloric imagery mostly of women sharing space with landscapes, plants and animals in a semi-hierarchical arrangement of flattened compositional planes, Hotte spares no effort in these exceedingly detailed motif paintings. Hatch marks upon hatch marks add to the tapestry-like feeling of the works. Giving them a rich texture while preserving the shallow depth of the compositions. “Labyrinth Women” as a figure-form motif, invites conversation between a symbol of the feminine and the complex architecture of the maze. Upon further examination these paintings also reveal a feat of building color. The slow accretive process of layering gradually thicker marks of different hues produces an optical mix that give the works depth of color without disrupting the overall lateral flatness. The artist says of these color combinations that they attempt to set a mood reminiscing or implying different times of night. Taking inspiration from literature, it’s not surprising there is an allegorical nature to the imagery. Times of night are experienced as transitional phases, where we witness the fractal psychedelia of nature’s repetitive cellular motifs. Themes of birth, repetition, mirroring, and reflection expand these notions of fractal doubling. As figures are placed side by side, and are reflected vertically not unlike a pond serving as a mirror. Witnessing these attempts to capture phases of night, we are left in the care and skill of the artist crafting this liminal space, frozen for a moment with strength and adaptability of image making that is rare to witness.