There is so much i Can’t Explain

Jocelyn fine

September 7 - November 2

There is so much i Can’t Explain

Jocelyn Fine

September 7 - November 2, 2024

FORMah Gallery is pleased to announce “There Is So Much I Can’t Explain,” painter Jocelyn Fine’s inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring six otherworldly, mesmeric paintings.

In these dreamlike landscapes, Fine unearths her memories of childhood travels across the United States and Europe, but these are not the landscapes of travel albums or picture postcards. Instead of fealty to a snapshot, these images are filtered through the haze of memory and are colored by the lens of charged emotions. Trees part to reveal a lake, a river winding through a mountain valley, a crescent moon above the horizon. But references to landscape painting end there. Fine uses colors strategically, provocatively and often surprisingly. An angry red sky is too red to be a sunset, stars are the colors of scattered candy corn, fat and glistening in yellow and orange. For every warm color, there is a counterpoint. Black is laid out in bold planes: a dark lake nestles between bright banks, an amorphous black shape with tendril-like protrusions is wreathed in pink, like negative space made physical.

In “Creature In Paradise” a forest of trees morphs into the creatures a child might recognize from a twisted fairytale. A bird gazes directly at us, looming over the treetops, while its plumes refused to be confined to the frame.

While Fine’s landscapes come to us from another world, they engage the body by way of the painter’s own. She paints gesturally, in layers, allowing the rhythms in her limbs to create pattern and line. And as memory articulates itself in images rather than words, it is no wonder Fine paints intuitively, letting the shapes that live inside her find their way to the canvas. What is connected through the fog of her memory finds permanent form when they coalesce in each painting. What results is at the intersection of abstraction, fantasy and the natural world.

“There Is So Much I Can’t Explain” exhibition is on view through November 2, 2024.

Written by Hall Rockefeller

Birds are also hidden within the forest canopy that hangs down from the top of “When Everyone Goes To Sleep (Fireflies Applaud In Delight)”. Amorphous tendril shapes appear again and again, reminding us that these landscapes could only come from one place: the memory of the artist.