Philip Martin Gallery is proud to present By Candlelight, a solo exhibition of new works by New Orleans-based painter Sophie Treppendahl. The show features jewel-sized, highly-detailed small works with succinct yet evocative titles such as, "Breakfast with Vuillard and Candles, Gray;" and "Dinner with Derain and Candles, Green."
Sophie Treppendahl's exhibition, "By Candlelight," takes as its motif the interior of her New Orleans home. With an eye to seriality, Treppendahl focuses on the mantle, with its French 19th-century styling; the wall behind it; and the dining table, the surface of which is scattered with objects as they might be found the morning after a dinner-party. In some sense, Treppendahl's works are informed by the domestic interiors of Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, two painters who met at the École des beaux-arts de Paris, where they shared an apartment with Maurice Denis, an artist and critic whose comment, "Remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order," is a key to painting today.
Sophie Treppendahl's awareness of the means of painting is acute: her brushstrokes, color choices, sense of pictorial rhythm and space inform the pictures she makes; at the same time, Treppendahl figures the interiority inherent in both looking at and making art. Vuillard, Bonnard and Denis together formed Les Nabis, "an avant-garde post-impressionist artistic movement based on the aesthetics of the Arts & Crafts movement, which aimed to mix major and minor arts; and to integrate art into everyday life." Sophie Treppendahl's own interest in the integration between art and life comes down to the personal as political by way of paintings that reveal not only her loved ones and her environs, but also herself as working mother, artist and activist.
“Through painting, I aim to capture not the likeness to an image but the overwhelming feeling of the space or a memory," Sophie Treppendahl writes. "In my studio, I work from recorded observations, often photographs and drawings, that then serve as a springboard to explore pattern, color, light and shadow. When creating, the representation becomes secondary, my primary focus becoming the painting process itself. As I translate reflection, pattern, and shadows through paint, the image lends itself to abstraction, manipulation and exaggeration. Through this, the painting takes on new life. And instead of creating a hollow representation of a moment that once was, I hope to create something altogether new." "This is a group of small paintings of dining rooms with remnants of meals and dinner parties," in which, "anxieties about the world" intersect with art-making, activism and community. Art-making is a means by which to find and communicate one's voice; activism is a parallel way in which to put that voice into action; community is a means by which to find fellowship and affect change. In Treppendahl's work we find inspiration to consider the world in which we live; the people with whom we share it; what we want for ourselves and others.
