Shoshana Walfish
Lately you’ve been glowing
From May 30 to July 6, 2024
Galerie Nicolas Robert is pleased to present Lately you’ve been glowing, the latest work by Brussels-based Canadian painter Shoshana Walfish, exploring how we simultaneously create, endure and dissolve the confines of embodiment.
When coming into contact with another person, you impact the boundaries of the other’s body, even if you don’t touch it directly. The mood, time and geography of every environment you enter will determine how you present inside of that environment, and in turn your presence will impact the nature of its space. How, as queer phenomenologist Sarah Ahmed says, the skin connects as well as contains. By playing with the familiar tools of figurative painting, drawing attention to strange bodily shapes and the abstraction of physical surroundings, Walfish twists and subverts expectations of the figure in space, putting into question the very ideas that lead to representation.
The lamp, appearing most concretely in the work that takes Ahmed’s observation as its title, is our entry point into a study of how people and their surroundings are in a process of mutual creation and definition. Frequently concerned with vessels - objects that carry the weight of societal expectations and historical narratives into her frames - Walfish offers here in the apparently prosaic form of a domestic lamp a vessel that quite literally both contains and emits, both part of, and creating, the physical space occupied by human bodies. Its distinctive shape is part of the physical world, affected by the various sociological and economic phenomena that shaped the industrial moment of its creation. The light it gives out delimits the space available to the figures as the scene for their own encounters.
Neither the light, nor the bodies, nor the rules of the space around them behave as expected for long. The lamps dissolve into organic shapes, leaving behind sources of light that appear as solid shapes on their own, or exert their impact from inside the figures themselves. Nude limbs connect to backgrounds that melt into foregrounds of apparently physical spaces whose enduring sense of depth belies the breakdown of rational perspective. Pleasurable tensions thrill between hands and feet hovering at the moment before connection. The heat and acid of the dramatically compressed palette fizz with potential reactivity.
The nudes themselves are seemingly unbothered by the collapse of their environments into increasing abstraction. Walfish presents a resoundingly queer-feminist take on the female nude: her figures are de-eroticised, calm and casual in their nakedness, suggesting the relaxed connections of chosen family. They are in concordance with each other, even as we realise their uncanny nature. Their skin takes on a glassy quality. They trade places with the lamps, light emanating from within them. Even in the apocalyptic struggle of Isochronal meanderings in depths unknown, they have a weightlessness and freedom that is missing from their more stable siblings and achieved completely by Where form and matter coalesce, with their presence lingering in the entirely abstracted space. They claim an idiosyncratic and resolutely personal ownership of somatic experience, Walfish’s rejection of both sexualised connotations of the represented nude figure and feminist theory’s banishment of physical bodies into metaphor.
The small-format works of Being as fluid offer a completion of the progressive abstraction of the larger pieces and a hint of what might be at its heart. They do not show the absence of bodily experience, but in fact its quintessence. They suggest places of exchange, sites where chemical messages are relayed across porous membranes, the whole body a restless multiplication of touch upon touch.
Text by Catherine Bailey Gluckman
Shoshana Walfish holds a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Her work has most recently been shown at Marian Cramer (Amsterdam), Kasteel D'Ursel (Antwerp), and in a solo exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Belgium (Brussels). She has also shown at Galerie Nicolas Robert (Toronto and Montreal), Beige Gallery in (Brussels), Brussels Art Nouveau and Design Festival (Brussels) and Birch Contemporary (Toronto).
