Delphine Hennelly (Brooklyn, USA) received her BFA from Cooper Union in 2002 and her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Visual Arts at Rutgers University in New Jersey in 2017. A painter, drawer and occasional printmaker, Hennelly explores figuration primarily using the female form. She is a three-time recipient of The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award. Recent exhibitions include a solo at Pt.2 Gallery (Oakland, USA) as well as a group show organized by James English Leary at Lisa Kandlhofer Gallery (Vienna, Austria) and a two-person show with Mimi Jung at Carvalho Park (New York, USA).

For a recent solo show of paintings at PT. 2 Gallery in Oakland California I revisited the theme of the traveler/wanderer, the idea of the figure in transience. The show was titled Wandering Players, taking its cue from the name given to actors of the Elizabethan period in England: Strolling Players. Slightly costumed, the figures in these paintings take on the role of actors playing archetypes in their ubiquitous banality. Meandering a stage, set in a bucolic landscape, an abstraction of the pastoral, dystopian idyllic. Anachronistic, their journeys remain random with their faithful dog following behind.

Taking as axiomatic the notion that there is no time but the present, which contains past and future, I work serially as a means to employ this concept of time in the paintings. Much of this thought stems from Gilles Deleuze’s ideas on Difference and Repetition. I enjoy the idea of a liminal space where past and future can be inscribed in a present. In painting a motif or an image over and over again I see the space of a continuity in time simultaneously accepting the fact of the still image. A painting will never be a narrative in movement, such as would happen in film, but perhaps a painting can allude to the temporal or the notion of an omnipresent event. I enjoy how in every repetition there occurs something specific, and therefore new in the work. It is within this structural thought that drawing continues to be a key component of the work. Welding concept with form I lean towards bending the nature of the paint to fulfill a graphic need, mimicking ideas of reproduction, the print, paper, ink, a doodle.

For playful levity my palette tends towards the pastel. Furthermore, the gendered proclivity pastel colors perpetuate is of interest to me in my wish to subvert such tropes. More recent paintings depict a departure from the pastel in their use of blacks and browns along with deep reds, purples and blues. In the paintings for Wandering Players, I conceptualized colors of archetypical ‘History Painting’ merged with the colors of a landscape in turmoil. Flower garlands decorate but also act as a foil, to distract; stones lock a picture plane in place like possible paperweights, a pair of pastoral lovers. All these motifs, along with colors I choose, work in service to formally build a ligature from which to hang the image. Within this framework the use of repetition and decoration, either masking or unmasking, offers a multiplicity of possible interpretations. In a text by Amy Goldin published in Artforum in 1975, titled “Patterns, Grids, and Painting”, Amy Goldin states: “Pattern is basically antithetical to the iconic image, for the nature of pattern implicitly denies the importance of singularity, purity, and absolute precision.” This quote perfectly exemplifies my interest in using repetitive motifs but more pointedly explains much of the reasoning behind my choice in duplicating an image. Golden further writes, “to see the same image over and over again in a variety of situations disengages the control of context and erodes meaning.” By playing with repetition, I enjoy seeing how far I can subvert the iconic image from its singular contextual meaning while retaining some residue of the power an iconic image can hold. Perhaps I am attempting to have my cake and eat it too. Nonetheless, it is the tension that lies in this dichotomy that has become fruitful in my wish to pursue figurative/pictorial inventiveness.

www.delphinehennelly.com