Fair: Paris+ by Art Basel 2023, Paris

For the second edition of Paris+ by Art Basel, Sans titre presents a solo project by Sequoia Scavullo.

The artist paints for those with no need to decode in order to dream. First and foremost, herself: brushes in hand, she tries to reminisce. Perhaps getting lost along the way, because she welcomes and basks in this state of waking wonderment. Out where articulated language, binary rationality, and dry cartography stop, creation can commence. Born in 1995 in Baltimore, Scavullo graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris last year. She practices oil painting in large format, surveying the shadowy zone between abstraction and figuration. Worked in layers and flaked in strata, the tones resist definition: between withered petals, palpitating flesh, and mineral grayness. No obvious colors, because everything is blended, become texture. The effect is of a rather liquid state, aqueous and foggy, propitious to the dissolution of certainty.

Exhibited at Sans titre for her first solo show in France this summer, her presentation for Paris+ by Art Basel is composed of four original paintings, with the addition of a film which, as often within the artist’s work, completes the overall sensory landscape. In it we recognize her characteristic style, and novel perspective lines specific to the moment of their realization. Evoking a loss of memory provoked by a chronic malady, Sequoia Scavullo suggests an analogy with an archeological site: an attempt to represent new images as one might excavate something from the earth, which covers vestiges reduced to the state of a thousand fragments. At the heart of this new presentation, the artist emphasizes duplicity. This ambiguous relationship to things is encapsulated in the Derridean concept of pharmakon, named for the Greek word for both remedy and poison; more broadly, it is characteristic of the organic kingdom: beyond good and evil, where what the artist calls a “poetry of confusion” thrives.

In such a way, one of the canvases finds its source in a car accident. Passed through the uncertain prism of memory, its representation intermingles with other scenes, intimate or even erotic in nature. Another canvas stems from a dream of the artist, in which she is healed by the beneficial action of water. One of its possible significations was revealed to her by her family: a Taino myth recounts that a sacred fountain possessed therapeutic powers. A third canvas shows opaque swirls escaping from a pipe, repeated in the manner of a pattern. It is a request for advice: the question still seems to be still floating in the air, already caught up, however, by the thick arabesques of smoke. If the philosopher Gilles Deleuze spoke of a Logic of Sense (1969), Sequoia Scavullo, for her part, declines a logic of what can be sensed – her work is necessarily uncertain, and resists limitation.

Ingrid Luquet-Gad

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Sequoia Scavullo (born in 1995, Baltimore) lives and works in Paris. She studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris with Mimosa Echard.

Sequoia Scavullo has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Sans titre, Paris (2023); Kunstverein Bielefeld (2022); Pigment Sauvage, Baltimore (2019).

Her work is currently on view in the exhibition ‘Nos corps anarchiques’, curated by Georgia René-Worms at Mécènes du Sud, Montpellier. Previous group exhibitions include: FRAC Corsica (2023); After Hours, Paris (2023); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2022); Exo Exo, Paris (2022); POUSH - Manifesto, Paris (2021); Haimney Gallery, Barcelona (2020); La Volonté, Paris (2020); Dorchester Art Gallery, Boston (2019); Piano Craft Gallery, Boston (2019); High Zero Foundation, Baltimore (2019); Barbara and Steve Grossman Gallery, Boston (2019); Yale Norfolk Galleries (2019).

The artist received the Diptyque price for contemporary art, curated by Jérôme Sans (2022); the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Prize (2021); the Dean’s Research Award (2019); the Dona Pond Painting Award (2019) and the Will and Elena Barnet Painting Award (2017).

She has participated in the KHIAL NKHEL residency program, Morocco (2018) and the Yale Norfolk program, Ellen Battell Stoeckel (2017).

Sequoia Scavullo’s works are featured in the permanent collection of FRAC Corsica.