Recenter is a delightful return to Impressionism in many ways. Prioleau-Martin chooses for her subject matter decidedly impressionistic themes—moments at home, moments of introspection, and unrehearsed tenderness, all the casual yet poignant subject matter that marked painting’s initial move from the historic and fantastical to the everyday and human in the 1870s. She also employs the paint with a focus to capture the spur of the moment and the unexpected. Her small-scale ceramics, composed on the templates of stock sculptural types—odalisques, Rodin-like romantic poses, and busts, are, by virtue of their Lilliputian size and wit, Impressionist re-interpretations of dry classic forms. They start out as one thing and shift mid-stream into another: this is particularly evident in Prioleau-Martin’s bust Self-portrait (2024) which masquerades as a planter with fabric and wire vegetal tendrils emanating from her cranium along with her braids.
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The faces in two portraits, Haha and Makeup and Dress (both 2024), are crafted in a confident painterly style which freezes a fleeting emotion, one of whole-hearted laughter, in Haha, and one of bemusement, or melancholy, or both, in Makeup and Dress. Manet-like, Prioleau-Martin lays down layers of color and then, above, or in-between, inscribes a darker line which defines the outlines of the features. The result, in Haha is that the entire painting is focused on the open laughing mouth, the white of the sitter’s teeth is a symbolic stand-in for the sound of laughter we know we should be hearing which is reinforced by the sitters tightlu closed eyes and the text (HA HA) dangling along an arc behind. The colors are expressionistic-rose madder flesh, with purple shadows, while the brushed in black of the recesses of the open mouth don’t actually fully cover the yellow paint underneath. Like Manet this is a self-consciously painted painting.
Makeup and Dress is a work similarly aware of how it was painted: the artist makes no effort to meld the neatly rendered features into the background color—the eyebrows, eyes, nostrils, and lips rest on top of a sienna-colored base. The title seems to come from the incongruent pink that straddles to the sitter’s face from just below the nose to just above the eyebrows—again existing independently of the coloring of the rest of the face and body. The rest of the painting also seems to consist of these stark coloristic confrontations—the right arm is light ochre and the aforementioned sienna, and the left is burnt sienna for shadow, sienna for flesh, and light ochre again for highlight.
In the paintings Worry Them, Alone Time, and Looking (all 2024), Prioleau-Martin plays with obscuring faces. The lower half of the faces in Worry Them and Alone Time are hidden, by cards in the former and a book in the latter. This is a pun on the idea of a portrait—where we can’t see the sitter because they are busy doing something more important than being looked at by us! In Looking the artist has very roughly sketched in the faces of the sitters in impasto-ed dark brown and black on yellow. It’s a short-hand for a face—a single stroke for the forehead, an inverted “V” for cheekbones and nose, and another stroke for the upper lip. Mask-like, what we primarily register is the implied, but not painted, sets of eyes. The hair of the three figures is similarly green on yellow, as are some of the plants in the background,
Prioleau-Martin is employing an economy of means to capture a simply duality. She shakes up the simple contrast with a realistic houseplant hanging on the right, and a jarringly precise wood-grain on the circular table on which the sitters rest their elbows. While she dips in and out of realism in all of the paintings—we are never allowed to forget about the paint and how it is used, though the artist goes through the trouble of peeling back the various layers for us.
Keisha Prioleau-Martin Recenter, at Olympia
Through February 8, 2025
41 Orchard Street, NYC
About the writer: Will Corwin is a sculptor and writer from New York. He makes cast metal sculptures and writes regularly for the Brooklyn Rail, Art & Antiques, and ArtPapers. His most recent curatorial project was 60s Synchronicities this past summer at the Collegiale Notre-Dame de Riberac in Perigord, featuring the work of Perle Fine, Marguerite Louppe, and Jann Haworth. His most recent exhibition was a survey of the work of his last ten years of sculpture, at River House Arts in Toledo Ohio, and will be at Geary Gallery in New York this coming April.