Vivien Russe: Networks
Sarah Bouchard Gallery, Woolwich, ME • sarahbouchardgallery.com • Through August 4, 2024
Juxtaposition is an artistic tradition dating back at least to the Surrealists who used it to create dreamlike imagery that created a sense of disorientation. Over the years Portland, Maine-based painter Vivien Russe has built her acrylic paintings around contrasting elements, placing side by side two or more images that play off against each other to create intriguing visual frissons. Some of them recall poet Allen Ginsberg’s “eyeball kicks,” defined as “the juxtapositions of disparate images to create a gap of understanding which the mind fills in with a flash of recognition.”
Russe’s show at Bouchard features several juxtapositions. In Again (Diptych), 2022, she pairs unfurling fiddleheads with an image of two small water-filled saucers. The coupling offers a challenge to fill that “gap of understanding” that lies between forms of nature and manufactured glassware.
Dispersed #2 (Diptych), 2022, combines fern fronds with what appears to be a transparent flower form set against a checkerboard pattern. This painting and two related pieces, Dispersed #1 and Dispersed #3, evoke the dissemination of seeds. They underscore what Russe says is the root of her recent work: the climate crisis and the damaging effects of human activity on the natural world and the planet.
Russe traces inspiration for the work to a visit to Acadia National Park in 2018 and a trip to view Renaissance paintings in Italy the following year. In Finding (Diptych), 2021, she places a study of lichen alongside a schematic of a dome. In doing so, she answers her own question: “Why is a lichen less holy than St. Peter?”
Moss and Maple, both 2023, celebrate the resplendence of the natural world. The former highlights bright green ground cover, the latter, elements of the tree: seedlings, fall-burnished leaves, flowers.
Russe presents a darker vision in one of her most recent pieces, In Memory Of, 2024. Here, fungus appears to spread over an old headstone. The artist admits to being discouraged by “the increased environmental degradation from political divisions, capitalism, population displacement and war,” yet her work,
so strikingly conceived and composed, carries a distinct visual pleasure.
And there you have it: the paradox of the world we live in.
— Carl Little