By BARRY N. NEUMAN, November 22, 2024
A force of destiny, painter Danielle Roberts, arrived on the art scene at the start of the 2021 – 2022 season, and, with a solo exhibition five months later, she set the balance of the season ablaze.
She’s now returned with a new solo show, “Phosphorescence and Gasoline” – again at Fredericks & Freiser, New York – and it exudes primality and modernity in worlds that are both exceedingly familiar and extraordinarily fantastical.
From her studio, Ms. Roberts consented to being interviewed via e-mail.
Barry N. Neuman: When I saw your painting, “Waiting,” in the Fredericks & Freiser exhibition stand at The Armory Show 2022, I was struck by how it palpably conveyed a slowing down of time.
Is it your intention to impart a sense of fluidity of time, and, if so, how do you work towards achieving this?
Danielle Roberts: Yes, time is a major theme in my work. In the early stages of conceptualizing a painting, I try to imagine how the light might feel. It’s usually not based so much on reality but more on the feeling of an experience. I begin with the color of “that” imagined light and I try to let it radiate throughout the surface. I use the feeling of the color to guide me through the painting. In my mind, this collapses the pictorial space and forces a kind of stillness to the setting, which is then offset by the figures and objects that might imply movement. For me the combination of stillness and implied movement builds a kind of tension, and maybe where some of the palpable sense of time that you refer to in my work is coming from. I think my sensibilities, in terms of my approach to physically depicting the essence of time, vary from painting to painting.
For example, in “Waiting,” the depiction of a person waiting for a bus implies time, but there are other aspects that enhance the feeling of time. Like the timeline of snow melting, which is suggested by the way the snow is painted. Or, the tire tracks left in the snow as a record of someone having moved through space. Also, the color of the sky makes it difficult to determine whether it is dawn, dusk, or a stormy midday. I think that in “Waiting” and in another bus stop painting, “Undertow”, from my show at Micki Meng, San Francisco, there is a comical sadness in the idea of waiting. Time is suspended, and it’s implied that the thing they might be waiting for is much greater than the bus, and that it may never come. I’ve always been drawn to making paintings where time feels complicated, off, or on the brink of something not depicted.
In terms of materials, I’m an acrylic painter. The current moment that I’m trying to represent in each work is related to the materiality of acrylic paint. The plasticity and speed of the paint both more closely relate to the present moment, and they create a physical echo of a certain sense of artificiality embodied in the contemporary experience of everyday life.
BNN: Your formative years were spent on Gabriola Island, and the arboreal imagery in many of your paintings seems to be inspired by the nature of the region.
How have your experiences, living on Gabriola Island, informed your work, and how do they compare to those of the city of Vancouver, where you attended Emily Carr University of Art and Design?
DR: Actually, I always think of myself as being between places. I was born in Stockton, California, and I spent time between there and the island. Gabriola doesn’t have a high school, so students begin commuting to Vancouver Island on the ferry every day from eighth grade on. I moved to Vancouver when I was 18 and frequently traveled between the islands and mainland.
It's really the difference of place, especially the function of space and light and how and for what purpose it varies from place to place that has informed my work. Also, it is the nature of being between places and, more specifically, between islands that slows things down.
My family lives in a California valley where things are very far apart. Most of my early memories are of traveling long distances in cars. Time spent in travel is like being in limbo. In waiting rooms, ferries, planes, and buses, time feels suspended, even though your body might be moving. In transit, there is a certain detachment between the self and a grounded sense of reality. That feeling of the suspension of time really informs my work and comes from the kind of landscapes I had to contend with.
Lastly, I would say that my high-contrast palette and surface are directly informed by British Columbia. My slick surfaces are like Vancouver on a rainy day. Light is reflected off the mostly glass buildings there and in the seemingly permanent puddles. The colors of everything in the landscape become supersaturated from the rain. The boreal forest and adjacent cities are where I pull the sort of deep dark and saturated colors from.
BNN: Each of your paintings has a great physical presence, which is alternately warm and cool and consistently enveloping. Your use of purple – in combination with other colors – is distinctive.
What can you say about your choices, concerning purple and the medium and application you use to achieve certain desired effects?
DR: It feels completely inherent to who I am and how I feel. I have always been completely drawn to color and my work is first and foremost psychological, and I have also always been an intuitive painter. If I thought about it more analytically, it is about the contrast - not only the contrast of light and dark but also, as you mentioned, the contrast of color relationships that balance both warm and cool.
Purple for me is always psychological and other-worldly. Purple can be either bright or dark at the same time without completely changing in character the way that other colors do. Much like my entire palette, some of the psychology is wrapped up in the contrast of deep, dark, muddy colors versus the ultra-vibrant, bold colors. I try to find harmony within the hard contrast. Part of it represents a kind of “comfort in chaos” that relates to personal experience - as if there is darkness in the light and light in the darkness or, maybe, a conflict of desire. It's simultaneously unsettling and comfortably familiar.
BNN: How has your relocation to New York contributed to your color palette?
DR: Oddly enough, I don’t think moving has influenced my approach to color. I always find it hard to see or interpret what is directly in front of me (which is why I like to sometimes hide the foreground of my paintings in darkness).
I have noticed that moving to New York City has inspired my compositions though. They have become more claustrophobic – like in “Twin Flames,” “Tomb of a Time,” or “Holy Void,” all of which are in my current show at Fredericks & Freiser.
I really feel the strangulation of space here. I have been becoming obsessed with forcing multiple spaces onto the surface and imagining it as a physical and psychological collapse of both literal space and psychological space.
BNN: The depiction of youth culture is omnipresent in pictorial media. Still, your works bring viewers into close contact with a distinctive set of individuals, who appear to be in their late teens and twenties, as they pass time in what appear to be downtown Manhattan or North Brooklyn bars and off-campus student apartments or rental share dwellings. The subjects and the environments they inhabit seem both familiar and unique in mood and character.
Notably, multiple colors characterize each figure, and paradoxically, the interiors they inhabit look both well-lit and dark.
One might assume your choice is generational, but what brings you to painting these subjects and environments with such a range of colors? Are you recalling lived experiences, creating imagined iconic imagery, reinterpreting tableaux in an immersive night-for-day manner, or something else altogether?
DR: It's all about temporality - even in terms of how I compose imagery from my past and present and from imagined stories. My interest in transition, change and desire lends itself to the psychology of youth culture - possibly because of that same pictorial media representation you referred to.
However, I also want to point out that the cost of living might be changing what we think of as youth culture. Most people I know who are living in major cities are in their thirties and living in shared housing situations. So, I think some of the physical signifiers of youth could be shifting. Either way, the symbolic nature of youth culture may be a jumping off point for understanding a kind of restless desire.
I became deeply interested in the concept of the “threshold” in renaissance and historical, western painting. The idea was that when one crosses the threshold, they were meant to have some deep spiritual transformation. In those historical paintings, it was all about religion. Since I am not religious, the idea for me became about an invisible line that one might cross and simply cause a personal transformation that’s specific to whatever a person might be going through. I started thinking about the spaces that I paint up against historical, western art paintings. I wanted to play with some symbolic imagery of the past in my paintings of contemporary spaces. Though sometimes subtle, my spaces have a lot of thresholds, barriers, doorways, lines on the concrete, and so on; all throughout each space, there is a potential for transformation. Also, historically in painting, I found it curious how light was often used to represent a form of enlightenment or holiness. By thinking in contemporary terms, I began to imagine our contemporary, artificial light functioning in a similar way. It is a way that I view as being a representation of an omnipresent power structure that binds all the figures under the same conditions. In my world, light is pretty insidious.
BNN: Each of your subjects projects a certain singular charisma. They’re seen hanging out, moving through space, executing tasks, or simply being.
The hair styles and fashions in your paintings appear to be au courant. However, with the advent of internationally transmitted media, fashion has become more universal and less regional.
What inspires you in the depiction of your subjects and their intrinsic characteristics and stylistic choices? Do their style choices signify anything about them and the circumstances of their lives?
DR: I am definitely interested in types and signifiers of subcultural identity. It interests me how an everyday object or a t-shirt might signify the kind of person someone is and how the construction of certain identities through clothing and hairstyles are always changing meaning. Though I realize that subcultures are almost non-existent now because of post-internet/social media, I’m also a product of my environment. I’m inspired by the people I see in my life: friends, family, and people in the areas I frequent. Most of my friends are creative “types.” This is my every day, and it’s what I’m used to seeing, so I’m not surprised that a certain “type” creeps in.
BNN: The experience of viewing your tremendously original work in-person is extremely rewarding. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but postulate how certain paintings and motion pictures may have served as points of reference for you.
Your bartender tableaux seem to have arisen from the one depicted in Édouard Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.” The physiognomy of some of your subjects seems to echo those seen in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s paintings. Aspects of your painting, “Phosphorescence and Gasoline,” appear to have been inspired by Utagawa Hiroshige and Caspar David Friedrich. Your outdoor settings and the Oregon forest in the pilot episode of “The X-Files” and the mysterious forest in David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” feel kindred in spirit.
Which, if any, artists, stories, histories, and motion pictures have served as points of departure for you?
DR: When I think of something influencing me enough to be a point of departure in conceiving and realizing my paintings, I think of music. A great album could inspire me over several paintings. I used to begin studio days, lying on the floor and listening to music before painting. It helps me to focus.
Some of my earliest visual sensibilities, in terms of how I think about painting, might have come from music videos. I relied pretty heavily on music videos as a cultural outlet, growing up in the ‘90’s. What I liked about them was that they felt like short visual poems; they could be completely wild or completely simple, and each one was so different from the next. They told a story through images in three minutes or less. I always thought music videos were a little like painting in that sense.
While I do frequently go to museums and galleries and watch a ton of films, I think of those influences as something more studied and learned. In that sense, they remain more superficial to me.
While I definitely borrow and appropriate sometimes - like in the example you gave with Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” - I have never really felt that visual art by other artists was my driving force. I think most of your examples are all very on-point though. I am inspired by Manet, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, David Lynch, and even “The X-Files.” (Although that pilot episode might have been set in Oregon, the series was filmed in Vancouver). Other examples of artists I admire are Toulouse-Lautrec, Edward Hopper, Munch, Otto Dix, and, in terms of more contemporary artists, Gregory Crewdson, Jane Dickson, Daniel Richter, Josh Smith, Maja Ruznic, and Peter Doig, amongst others.
BNN: What’s next for you?
DR: Next, my work will be in a group exhibition, “Night Shade: The World in the Evening,” at Oakland University Art Gallery in Rochester, Michigan, from January 16 to March 30, 2025. I am really looking forward to this one. There are some really incredible artists in the show. I am very happy to have been included!
Having read Danielle Roberts’ illuminating words about her nighttime visions, it is strongly recommended that you spend your days going to Fredericks & Freiser to see her spectacular solo exhibition, “Phosphorescence and Gasoline,” through December 7, 2024.
“Danielle Roberts: Phosphorescence and Gasoline”
October 24 – December 7, 2024
Fredericks & Freiser
536 West 24th Street, New York NY 10011