Transgressive at Roswell Space presents two different visions of the natural world, creating wonderful dynamics between Susan Joseph’s sensuous, immersive paintings, and the almost clinical ink and watercolor studies by Andrea Bersaglieri. The evocative tension of the two bodies of work call to mind Northern European botanical studies of the last several hundred years, particularly Dutch still life paintings and botanical drawings and prints of the 16th and 17th centuries. Spanning richly painted and rendered paintings of flowers, as well as precisely drawn studies of nature, there is a soft duality between the present moments of Joseph’s effulgent flowers, and the forensic past depicted in Bersaglieri’s drawings and watercolors of nature in a moment of stoppage.
Joseph’s paintings of morning glories are lush and verdant, pools of green leaves and twining stems that erupt into saturated colors in the flower’s trumpet-shaped blossoms. Executed in both oil and gouache, the paintings resonate in different ways. The oil paintings, like BlossomsM, have less saturated color than the gouaches, but provide closer views of the flowers. The gouaches smolder and glow with luminescent hues of pink, blue, and purple, as in Chaos 3 (one of a suite of nine paintings, hung in a grid), and Purple Morning Glories 2, the velvety surface of the unframed gouache accentuating the colors in each work. Throughout, the works extend to the edge of their paper and canvas, as though straining to burst past those borders.
Two of Joseph’s paintings, Pink and Purple Morning Glories – Blossoms and Pink and Purple Morning Glories – Leaves, are wide but not tall, yielding an almost panoramic sense of opening up a different visual space than the rectangular works. Pink and Purple Morning Glories – Blossoms depicts several blossoms interspersed with leaves and stems that arc across the canvas in languorous fashion, an almost physical yearning in the flower as it reaches out for support.
The opulence of Joseph’s paintings is offset by the almost dispassionate observations in Bersaglieri’s drawings and paintings. Soil clods, uprooted plants, and dead birds are precisely depicted in ink and watercolor, sensitive and almost elegiac in the mute white backgrounds that surround them. Although some artwork hangs unframed, those that are framed seem as if they are mounted in shallow vitrines, amplifying the sense of a naturalist’s studies, rather than purely aesthetic images.
Yet there is a wonderful quality to Bersaglieri’s artwork, a visually compassionate engagement with each subject that elevates beyond mere documentation. Her multiple watercolors of dead birds range from Dead Hummingbird, the titular avian on a diagonal trajectory, its almost iridescent fuchsia ruff sparkling amid the darker colors of the other feathers, to perceptive images like Severed Wings, a jarring image of some violent encounter. Dead Blue Jay, with talons splayed above the round curl of the bird’s body, adds some interesting visual dissonance; and Flattened Crow reveals a sly, understated humor in the artist’s observations. Her studies of plants and soils, as well, escape the sterility of mere illustration in works like Corona Cap, a watercolor study of a clump of weeds and soil pulled from the ground with an actual bottle cap attached to a trailing root.
Delightfully complementary, these two bodies of work deftly project a vitality of form and content in the context of naturalism.
The exhibition ended in late 2022.