Christiane Pooley - Paintings 2008-2018 - Beau Livre

Christiane Pooley feels her way through memory and history as she paints. Landscape predominates throughout, tender with complex events and bodies, unresolved tensions held by a very particular quality of light. Part dream, part documentary, Pooley's work situates the viewer in a hazy place. We are not quite sure where we are grounded. Layers of time—past and present—softly conjoin, collaborate, trouble one another.
We absorb these relations via a certain visual resonance, through repeated scenes, studies in the passage of time. Her paintings hold a deep relation to Romanticism, combined with a contemporary sense for the politics of place, of mutable perspectives, simultaneities and dissonances. Pooley learns as she paints and continues to offer us a slow dance with the sublime, the melancholy and the political.