Only a handful of the fourteen paintings in Josephine Halvorson’s “Unforgotten” appeal to trompe-l’oeil conventions. But with the show hotly following the controversial “Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was hard to avoid focusing on the connection. Halvorson has long depicted tableaus oriented vertically parallel to the picture plane (cork boards or simply wooden walls) with pinned receipts, sketches, letters, and flyers, as in New England blacksmiths2021, or Important Notice, 2023, both presented here. Its intention is neither to deceive the viewer nor even to simply create an awe-inspiring mimetic image, as it provides neither the clean, seamless execution we would associate with trompe-l’œil nor its tactile rendering of surfaces and manifestations. minimal volumetrics, such as the folds of a sheet of paper. Halvorson’s relatively loose and painterly style puts his art at a distance from all illusionism, as does the transparent and bodiless nature of his acrylic gouache.
If her paintings are based on observation, she is less interested in realism than in fiction. The arrangement of the elements in the frame does not construct a determined narrative that the viewer is supposed to unravel; it raises questions. Why is a copy of the Winter 2000 issue of New England blacksmiths, the newsletter of a rather obscure membership organization, be pinned next to a handwritten note dated April 25, 1984, thanking a certain John “for the work done in Truro”? The latter might have to do with the forge, but the distribution of dates suggests that these objects were probably not found together. Although the exhibition’s online catalog states that Halvorson’s works “emerge from chance or repeated encounters with objects the artist encounters”, in this case it is hard not to imagine a more deliberate. A little research reveals that Halvorson’s father was called John and he was a steelworker who died of Covid-19 in 2020. But if the work is to be a memorial, it hardly wears his heart on its sleeve, and the why these objects were chosen to commemorate him remains unspoken.
Which is true of a single painting selected for the exhibition as a whole. Each piece felt, in its particular attention to a single object or situation, quite self-contained, and the subjects were as varied as their clear titles would indicate: buried barrel2022; roadside memorial2021; Counter station, 2023, etc. Together, they seemed to constitute the portrait of a place. But is this place somewhere on the map or in the mind? The painter does not make it a point to provide precise coordinates, and the sparseness of the framing context is quite relevant. Facts are found, but truth is constructed. The largest and most impressive work shown here was Peony, 2022, a grid of twenty-five 13-by-16-inch panels depicting a flowering bush from different angles. . . or is it several bushes crushed against each other? You can neither completely put the puzzle together nor take it apart. The formal unity of the composition – surmounting the glued cuts from one panel to the other – cannot be confused with a referent unity.
Dismissed by many as “nothing more than a dazzling performance of virtuosity”, trompe-l’oeil was a product of the Baroque era, when the relationship between illusion and being carried theological weight. “Baroque goodness, recalls Yves Bonnefoy, is not the opposite of evil, but of doubt. It is even absolutely imperative that life be revealed as a dream – so that, in the collapse of false proofs, the need for grace arises. But doubt, as we know better than ever today, is our only approach to truth. Halvorson described trompe-l’œil as “a useful analogy” for the many ways in which “painting can define itself: as a surface, as an illusion, as everyday life, as a wall”. But she knows that these different definitions may not be congruent. And with no grace offered, his paintings remind us that the transition from sensory perception to knowing can be disconcerting.
