Joan Semmel: Recent Work at the gallery Morán Morán

I can’t observe because now I am.
Rigoberta Bandini

Red Floor (2020) is a painting in which the artist has painted her nude body from her own point of view. It’s not difficult to imagine her looking down, using her right hand, absent from the composition, in order to prepare the colors and apply the paint to the canvas. If her head is not figuratively in the painting, it’s in any case there in an even more compelling way, since it’s “from” her that we see the image.

For several decades, the artist has also used other tools, such as mirrors and cameras, allowing her to capture herself from different angles. Even though the compositional result differs from those paintings made “in the first person,” the feeling of intimacy is nevertheless preserved: the artist works with these tools as extensions of herself. In any case, what remains is the sovereignty of her gaze over her body.

This sovereign act of representation—of herself, of the female body—sustains a frank opposition to that male gaze which seeks a relation of superiority of observer over observed. By being herself the motive of her gaze, by inviting us to be part of this encounter, she traces a topology of intimacy in which the coordinates “inside” and “outside” lose their meaning. In Semmel’s work, this space of hers that extends towards us is one of complicity, never of domination.

Another aspect that is powerfully striking in Semmel’s work is the use of color. Even though we can confirm the figurative character of her palette—for example in the representation of light and in certain colors that we imagine to be close to that of the artist’s skin—these very soon become saturated tones that are articulated in relations of strong contrasts. In Touching Toes (2019), for example, the body color transitions from red to green to yellow to blue.

We could understand them as reminiscences of her abstract period at the beginning of her career. Undoubtedly. But we could also experience them as the result of seeing color from the inside: it’s not only the color of the skin or the light falling on it that she paints, but also the sensations of her own muscles, tense or relaxed, of the tickle in her fingers, or the lump in her throat.

Semmel’s colors are enhanced by the many different ways of applying the paint: very subtle transparencies that suddenly become gooey batches, brushstrokes of different thicknesses, opaque lines in the folds…always revealing the multiple layers, allowing the color to interact in depth and then turn into a mound on the canvas. The skin in these paintings is anything but a surface; it is the skin of a body covered by more than eighty years of intensities.

— Eric Valencia

Translated to English by Byron Davies

Recent Work by the artist Joan Semmel is being presented at the gallery Morán Morán until May 26, 2022.

Cover picture: Joan Semmel, Red Floor, 2020. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York. Copyright 2022. Joan Semmel / Artists Right Society (ARS) New York.