With Me 2020

Curator: Martine Johanna's painting "With Me," completed in 2020, features a captivating portrait rendered in oil paint. What strikes you immediately about this piece? Editor: It feels intensely private, almost claustrophobic, doesn’t it? Like walking into a room during a very personal moment. The embrace suggests intimacy but the averted gaze introduces such melancholy. Curator: Indeed. The artist's labor here is focused on evoking intimacy through figuration. I’m particularly interested in how she handles the liminal space between contemporary portraiture and traditional oil techniques. Oil paint offers this incredibly tactile, buildable surface for expressing emotional weight. Editor: Oh, totally, you can practically smell the linseed oil! The chromatic iridescence that seems to come from everywhere. It is pretty spectacular. You know, the very visible brushstrokes... it gives this fragile quality, like the emotion could just dissipate any second. Curator: Exactly. And let's not forget that by choosing oil paint—a material with such a long history in Western art—Johanna also places this modern emotionality within a lineage of portraiture concerned with revealing the interior lives of its subjects. What’s compelling is how she is both paying homage to that tradition while critiquing it. Editor: Hmm, how so? The gaze downwards certainly feels, in a contemporary way, like a desire to retreat from the world, something very relatable and perhaps new when it comes to portraiture. Curator: I agree. And consider, too, the consumption aspect: a contemporary figurative painting like this invites us to consume an idealized and commodified emotion. Editor: Like buying sadness! (Laughs). No, I see your point. The art market itself has always had its own politics of emotional extraction and display, so the act of placing introspection on display… has its complications. Curator: It does. But this piece is so well done, with impressive production and making that it leaves you really to dwell in the painting’s moment, doesn't it? Editor: Absolutely, "With Me," makes me feel present but somehow unseen, suspended in the privacy of someone else’s intense feeling. I'm leaving feeling moved by Martine Johanna. Curator: Me too, especially because the way material choices here intersect to create that experience offers, as well, a profound comment on contemporary life.