Night Gardens, Galerie Javault, Paris, 2023, exhibition text by Jean-Baptiste Brenet
Note on the Sestina group, 2021-2022
This series of paintings was conceived and first begun in November of 2021 as a way to formally and conceptually explore desire. Desire in its erotic sense, and more importantly, in ways approached by a long line of thinkers; Aristotle, Spinoza, Descartes et al. Desire as appetite and volition, as the striving for perseverance in being.
While I often work in formally similar groupings, related by composition, palette, or form, this group of paintings is the first to be guided by a defined structure, where I was moved to follow the construction of the sestina.
The sestina is a form of Italian verse, composed of six stanzas of six lines and a three-line envoy. The end words of the first stanza are repeated in a different order as end words in each of the subsequent five stanzas; the closing envoy contains all six words, two per line, placed in the middle and at the end of the three lines.
I was listening to a podcast while making the first painting of this group about the poem “Sestina” by Elizabeth Bishop. While this poem speaks about the poet’s childhood and associated memories, the structure and repetition of the poem provided a platform for my thinking about desire, about words. Words that might come at the end of the lines of my sestina should I choose to write them. Words like vibration, volition, thrum, violet, phthalo, petrichor. Et al.
A. Blumenthal