Press Release

MLF l Marie-Laure Fleisch is pleased to announce Tessa Perutz’ first solo exhibition at the gallery, Jardin du Midi. Perutz’ immersive installation features paintings of abstract, spiritual landscapes, which share the space with a large embroidered textile work and a thick carpet of lavender flowers from the Lavanderaie des Hautes Baronnies, coating the entire floor of the gallery. The lavender’s calming scent provides an environs of tranquility and reflection, in which the viewer is presented works that explore the depths of natural worlds, life cycles, and collective memory. The simultaneous individuality and universality of these considerations resonates strongly, revealing the works as landscapes of the soul.

Specific sceneries and substances in the works are chosen as mementos, demarking periods in time. By utilizing these locations and materials, the artist explores nature’s capability to unify viewer and maker, as well as the sharing of memories via the familiarity of the landscape. Perutz produces works that memorialize people and experiences through direct visual sensations. Motifs of bodies of water, forest canopies, botanicals and the sun and moon play freely in her works, opening up spaces to consider personal and universal themes of connection and separation.

By incorporating materials such as sand, lavender and hibiscus Perutz references the healing properties found in nature. Influenced by traditions in Eastern medicine, the artist aligns the artworks as also referencing Western practices such as herbalism, naturopathy and other disciplines. The physicality of the materials works in harmony with the visuals of the landscapes, gracefully balancing colour, rhythm and symmetry. For the first time, Perutz includes these materials in the paintings themselves, mixing in sand sourced from various locations to create texture but also to physically integrate places and ritual into the artworks.

Notions of spirituality are also key; in both personal and more interconnected ideologies. Concerned with the cyclical nature of life and afterlife, the artist repeats specific abstract and representational motifs to simulate the recurring waves of energy found in all life forms. Allusions to natural symmetries or patterning, via reflections in water, sun cycles, or split horizons, reflect an inquiry into the infinite nature of regeneration and rebirth - constant in both the human and natural worlds. In this way, mirroring is used frequently as a philosophical device.

An essential element in Perutz’s practice is colour, often reminiscent of psychedelia. A wide palette is used to delineate familiar forms, which become wondrous and dreamy, evoking feelings of wanderlust. Fields or forests are depicted in vivid hues of tropicalia, freeing them from notions of temporality of geography. Mixing signals for night and day, the works exist a fantastical world which is available to us only through Perutz’ unique vision.

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Tessa Perutz
Jardin du Midi
notes by Evelyn Simons

It has been a bit over a year now since Tessa Perutz has changed the decor of her daily life from New York to Brussels. Since, she has ventured out into various regions of Belgium and its neighbouring countries, revisiting longstanding memories as well as discovering new territories. This exhibition, bearing the illustrious title Jardin du Midi is a testimony of this spontaneous exploration: pinpointed with anecdotes, hasty jottings and existential ponderings. Simultaneously, this body of work stands as an invitation: a heartfelt welcoming of wandering bodies and minds into a momentum of sensorial contemplation.

The gallery exudes the unmistakable scent of lavender, spread in abundance over the floor for you to wade into. The calming and soothing effects of this lush carpet instantly evoke a sense of tranquillity, a paradise of serenity.

Perutz is a landscape painter. She follows a hefty tradition by doing so, but liberates herself from the shackles of this legacy with each sketch, each brushstroke, each sign or pictorial gesture. Her works feel extremely fresh and free, as if they are not driven by a canon, nor want to be iconoclastic. They are paintings without be overtly self-aware that they are.

Her landscapes are driven by centrifugal movement. They lure you in with their appealing and buoyant colours, only to disorient you once your gaze is hooked. Trees, bushes, lakes, paths and flowers are – on a closer look – difficult to discern. Perutz paints generously, and with utter precision. Paint is applied in thick but homogenous layers, the compositions seem to have been made up of cutouts. Their whimsical outlines transform volumes into surrounding negative spaces and vice versa, conveying a density in which every element stands on the same plane. This plays out a tension between idyll and confusion, whirling up the perspective to make you feel encapsulated by these opaque universes.

Perutz’ body of work at large is shaped by processes of conceptualization, intuition and execution; phases that don’t occur linearly but that intertwine and inform each other. Visually, this translates into echoes of paintings making appearances in others, in playing with scale and repetition – both in subject and in colours, in mirroring and in excavating the potential of seriality. This unearthing of patterns and motives from the artist’s own repertoire, is inscribed by a fascination for signage and the impermanence of mark making. Collectively, they form an iconology that runs as an undercurrent through a personal biography. At the back of the space: a mystical portal on textile, an entry point. The pace is rhythmic, the timeline cyclical. Spaces are interchanged, memories fade, and events overlap.

Throughout this chronology of moments, the energy never dissolves but continues to flow.
Organic additions such as the sand in the paint as well as the lavender live their own lives – reminiscent of how memories are shaped by our unconsciousness – adding to the process of decay and reincarnation. The universal feeling of loss is soothed by this understanding, and expressed through the juxtaposition of seemingly opposing (but actually endlessly subsequent) natural phenomena such as the cycles of dusk and dawn, the moon and the sun.

Loved-ones left behind are partially healed with new friendships; a scenic walk at Bois de la Cambre merges with memories of upstate New York. This melting pot of crisscross-wired thoughts impregnates the cheerful colours in Jardin du Midi like a phantasmagoric place. The scenes bleed from the canvas, and their human absence expresses the psychedelic sensation of physical decentralisation. Jardin du Midi overlays lived with imagined or remembered realities, be they from the artist or from you. The environment takes you in as a disembodied vessel for new memories.