Jeanie Riddle

Sometimes an image opens the wound.

Sometimes it closes it.

In a world where images have been deactivated—of their political power, their emotional impact, their narrative possibility—Jeanie Riddle insists on the force of the perceptible: a sensibility that is neither superficial nor decorative, but embodied, processual, and at times, painful.

What we see is not a scene, but it remains.

A suspended narrative, without resolution.

Counting in Letters is built from fragments: earthy and pastel paintings, cropped photographs, shapeless canvases, found objects, sheets of paper hanging like textiles, pieces of things that were once part of something else. There is an ethics of what is recovered, of what is re-inhabited from the present in order to look back. It is not about restoring or reconstructing, but about coexisting with traces.

By appropriating these materials, Jeanie also takes on their possible stories: those carried by wallpaper, broken objects, blurred images, unfinished texts. Colors, folds, threads, stains: everything speaks of a tenderness that does not deny trauma, nor disguises it.

A tenderness that seeks to answer the question:

How do we keep living after loss?

The exhibition oscillates between painting and sculpture, between the intimate and the architectural. Every gesture seems to care for something broken. Every structure, no matter how minimal, holds a memory. As if the artist were weaving shelters for what is no longer there.

The works in this exhibition were created in Mexico, with local materials, affective conversations, and everyday gestures. And yet, they carry echoes of the Francophone Canada where the artist grew up. An emotional and cultural history that Jeanie revisits with tenderness.

Without nostalgia.

In her practice, emotions become form.

Wounds become color.

Time becomes fold.

There is something deeply human in this work: an attempt to hold what is falling, to name what has no shape, to say—in its own way—that we are made of remnants.

And in those remnants, there is also beauty, there is also future.

Counting in Letters refers precisely to this way of narrating that does not follow the logic of quantity. It is not about counting in numbers, but in names, in experiences, in poems, in minimal gestures that remain etched into matter. It is a form of counting that does not organize or rank, but whispers, names from the margins, reconstructs an emotional story without the need for chronology.

Her work can be understood as a language of its own, made of remnants, soft structures, and quiet decisions.

A language that, from the everyday, continues counting in letters what sometimes cannot be said any other way.

- Luis Manuel Perea