Galerie d’Outremont

Cruel to be Kind / Les plus beaux cauchemars is a project curated by Anaïs Castro and Alice Ricciardi for Pictura 2023. It unfolds into three spaces that open at different intervals throughout the fall of 2023. At Galerie d'Outremont, the project becomes a space of experimentation that brings together the work of two artists whose aesthetic intentions fundamentally differ. Delphine Hennelly's practice is usually figurative and invested in highly referential research, while Jeanie Riddle's is dappling with abstraction in an approach to painting that is material above all else. Working with and through each other, Riddle and Hennelly have carved a space within their practice for exchange, hospitality, friendliness, and reciprocity. 

Delphine Hennelly is hybridizing painting gestures, drawing from sources as varied as Renaissance painting, British children's illustration books, fauvism, etc. While her work dabbles in a wide range of traditions pertaining to figuration, Hennelly remains principally concerned with her work on a formal level and deliberately avoids relying on the creation of a narrative. Hennelly pays meticulous attention to blurring the figure without obscuring it totally. She uses a variety of ruses to achieve this, including judicious use of colour, rigorous textural patterns, and brushstrokes, which often give the impression of a filter over the image. This is all the more interesting considering Instagram's role in promoting painting in recent years. As a matter of fact, Instagram is a tool that Hennelly has fully embraced. She even admits that she photographs her work at various stages of production to understand how her paintings look through the digital lens of her iPhone. For me, there is here a Feminist perspective that recognizes the unfair compromise of being visible as a woman in our society today: being at once desired and despised. Instagram undoubtedly epitomizes this twofold deportment. In the artist's work, figuration is graspable but not always definite, a posture towards figuration that is emblematic of the cautious shuffle in and out of perception that has become essential to survive within predominantly white and patriarchal spaces.

In turn, Jeanie Riddle leans towards minimalist abstraction, focusing on exploring the full potential of geometric forms. Geography holds a significant place within her artistic pursuit, whether it is the colours of California, where she lived in the 1990s, or, more recently, the unique palette of Mexico City. Over the past decade, Riddle has dedicated herself to developing a painting practice that expands into the sculptural realm. Through her installation practice, Riddle disrupts the gallery space and transforms it into an abstract site that combines ordinary or domestic objects with traditional painting materials such as canvas and acrylic paint. Riddle fearlessly ventures into arenas typically associated with the feminine, such as the domestic realm, home decor, and beauty care, thereby imbuing a feminist perspective into the complexities of abstraction brought into the three-dimensional sphere. Her work evokes a confounding sense of place while retaining the comforting familiarity of the home. By strategically placing her work in the gallery space, Riddle sets the stage for material encounters and exchanges with the public.

The contrasting aesthetics of Riddle and Hennelly are resolutely different in their ambitions. However, through this unique experiment at Galerie d'Outremont, together, the artists prompt us to consider painting's influence beyond the boundaries of the canvas. There lies a political potential for symbolic and intangible representations manifested in pictorial form to compel us to consider how spaces and images have an immaterial impact on our lives. Their palettes, primarily consisting of powdery pastels, are decisively feminine and deceptively sweet, yet the work itself remains undeniably subversive. This second part of Cruel to Be Kind / Les plus beaux cauchemars Trojan-horses feminine codes and iconography to transform the gallery space into an experiment towards transformative care and compassion.

By Anaïs Castro