Melanie Authier

Mercurial Season

February 1, 2025 – March 15, 2025

Melanie Authier

Mercurial Season

February 1 – March 15, 2025

Opening reception: Saturday February 1st, from 2-5pm

Excerpts from an eight-hour conversation between Melanie Authier and Taiga Korper-Bentley.

“Okay so hold on, tell me more about rhizome?” I asked Authier, while sitting cross-legged on the floor of her studio regarding in awe this newest series of her paintings in the weeks leading up to the show. Peeking out from behind a 9ft canvas, Authier told me to think of branches, of veins within the body, of roots, of the Weeping Willow which can destroy the plumbing system of an entire suburb by creeping infinitely, steadfastly outwards. She explained that she sees her painting process like that of the rhizome. Even though Authier only works on a single painting at a time, the conversation of her visual language, palette, gesture, intention, is then continued onto the next canvas, and the next. The lyrics of the past painting becoming the thesis of the following, a continuous leitmotif, the roots of her tree digging deeper, into infinity. In a way, all of Authier’s career has been spent painting a singular painting, a continuation of the same conversation held across years.

“Remind me about pathetic fallacy?” Authier asked me, as she gracefully twirled paintings around to reveal their abundance of colour and gesture like magic tricks, one after the other. And I explained the best I could how the weather of a film will reflect the experience of the main character (no one really thinks it should be sunny during a funeral). This was in response to the title of the show, Mercurial Season, a name the artist felt fitting because, during the creation of many of these paintings, the clouds, the climate, the fires and floods across the globe all seemed to mirror and echo the internal turmoil that surrounded Authier’s psychological and emotional state.

Authier then went on to tell me about the myth of Scylla and Charibdys, a voyager’s choice between two dangers, the lesser of two evils, the rock and the hard place, the seamonster and the vortex. I tumbled like Odysseus into the canvases to navigate the precarious paths Authier had set forth with her brush. Like the sailor, we seek a horizon to ground us, to give us a sense of relative place. But what do you do on a day the sea bleeds into the sky with no boundary between them? Authier has harnessed this uncertainty and mastered it. Playing with atmospheric space, linear perspective, and the unsettling moments in between, she punches holes into the two-dimensionality of abstraction and paints the depth of the void, the deep deep forever of space unending. Small moments of recognition – a cloud, a wave, a rock, things that look like things – offer anchors like footholds to breathe and pause as you decide where to look next, up down or sideways across the expansive surface that seems somehow bigger on the inside than the outside.

Dorothy Gale stepped from the dust and ruins of her old life into the technicolour brightness of Oz. This is all I could think of when I first encountered Authier’s 27ft triptych, Strange Alchemy, which traverses from the black and white of her iconic grisaille works into an intense, saturated chroma and back again. Throughways of line and gesture offer an unsettling continuity across three massive canvases that make up this piece, and it comes at you with an energy and sense of motion so intense the only thought in my mind for a long moment was, ‘we’re not in Kansas anymore.’

The surfaces of Authier’s paintings are in turn romantic and violent. Inspired by J.M.W. Turner’s ability to paint sky and air as physical subject, and Henry Fusili’s implied line and movement, with his barely perceptible mythological creatures lurking in the shadows, Authier leans into the contrasting experience of rock as light as cloud, and air as thick as water. Landscapes converge and break apart into abstract line and space over and over, and the harder you try to pull them together into a sensible environment, the more they trick and evade you. Navigation isn’t easy, but the destination is divine.

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This exhibition features a selection of works on paper created during Authier’s artist residency at the Napoule Art Foundation, France. Read about the works on paper HERE.

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Installation photographs by Laura Findlay. @lfdocumentation