Jennifer Lefort

In recent paintings and sculptures shown at Patrick Mikhail’s spanking new Montreal premises (he also has a gallery in Ottawa), Jennifer Lefort demonstrated once again a refusal to rest on her laurels. Using spray paint to conjure a backdrop, and for palette enhancement, Lefort has created extravagant spatialities and a beguiling, specifically Matta-like deep space.

The iconography of her paintings has never been gratuitously elegant; the easy answers of abstraction are not for her. Replete with an almost rude semiosis that spans the museum exhibition hall and the street corner, the dozen or so large-, medium- and small-scale paintings (all dating from 2015) have a startling self-presence. Lefort employs gestural and biomorphic gambits destined to jolt us out of any viewing complacency.

“Dire Oui (Say Yes)” is an affective exercise in affirmation and ongoing experimentation that reflects a fundamental value in Lefort’s approach to painting, neither conventional nor safe. Her use of spray paint in painting and on Plexiglas shapes in sculpture are a testament to her restlessness. Veering close to the spatial fields of the Chilean-born Surrealist Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren (1911–2002) or being informed by them in semaphore-like fashion (because any mensurable influence is doubtful—think Lynda Benglis instead), and without attempting to reproduce or emulate them, her marks plunge us into complex spatial depths like a bracing cerebral and somatic immersion—hydrotherapy for the soul.

This new work is all about morphology and its discontents. Such is the case with a large painting in the exhibition like In the Midst (purple changes everything), 2015. On one viewing, her charged marks are understood as laterally layered artefacts that nonetheless possess vertical depth, like staccato epistemological punctuations. On another they seem like cinematic distantiations with notable facilitators like obvious jump cuts, glaring lighting, etc. Or, as charged particles that appear and disappear like coding that has the properties of invisible ink, creating a mental distance in the viewer’s apprehension before drawing us back in again.

The phenomenal vigour that is her hallmark is very much in evidence here. Lefort’s continuing consumption of the highly charged cacophony of urban culture without apology and on a painter’s healthy diet has been a starting point for her past work. That work is even edgier now. It has always been edgy, as if Lefort has decided to challenge her fellow artists to abandon both the status quo and persistent rumours of orthodoxy, and step up and be counted. It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that she is the least timid artist around.

In her radiant painting world, constellations aggregate like staggered sequences of luminous signs not fixed in place but always on the move in a state of perennial ignition. In the work, sundry traces of trompe l’oeil master James Havard rub shoulders with Grace Hartigan’s hectic Ab Ex licks, and Basquiat’s hebephrenic street lexicon segues with the contorted squiggles (now in 2D) of Lynda Benglis’s sculptures.

Once again, Lefort mixed up scale to good effect, with tiny paintings like Untitled, 2015, playing off larger ones as if they were flotillas that bolstered and advanced the tactical advantage of the whole exhibition. The work demonstrated the exquisite nature of her painting at the level of its microstructures, so that the smallest works on canvas enjoyed parity with the larger ones like Past and Future (feeling neon pink & green), 2015, and heterogenous signal groups in one painting communicated effortlessly with its neighbours.

The sculptures with their totemic cartography are like painting’s funky envoys into sculpture’s domain. Indeed, like lanky left-handed pitchers from the outfields of painting—but still closely associated—they show Lefort to be a gifted sculptor. These raw-boned and trunk or bough-like signifiers supported the heavy chromatic fruits hanging from their upper branches with dark and lustrous aplomb.

“Dire Oui (Say Yes)” offers what is surely a worthy foretaste of Mikhail’s showcase of a new Lefort solo project at Volta 11 in Basel, Switzerland, during Art Basel from June 15 to 20, 2015. ❚

“Dire Oui (Say Yes)” was exhibited at Patrick Mikhail Gallery, Montreal, from April 8 to May 16, 2015.

James D Campbell is a writer and curator in Montreal who is a frequent contributor to Border Crossings.