Novelty 2018

Joshua Flint painted Novelty, and you can see how the wet-on-wet oil paint is just allowed to happen. It’s this luscious surface of soft tones, where a figure is almost dissolving into the scene. I keep thinking about the paint-handling here, and how the liquidity almost embodies the ambiguity of the whole scene, in which the architecture and landscape are sort of merging together. The figure has this strange mask, so you can’t quite tell what’s going on, and the brushwork just echoes that sense of mystery. I really enjoy the way the paint around the bathtub is pulled and dragged into watery reflections in the foreground, almost as if the whole image is reflected in a pool of water. This reminds me a lot of Pierre Bonnard, who was also interested in dissolving figures into a kind of dreamy domestic space, but Flint really brings something of his own to the conversation. For me, this piece is all about how paintings don’t need to tell you what to think. They just want you to feel something.