BERNADETTE DESPUJOLS
Homesick
September 16 – October 15, 2022
Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles
Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present Homesick, an exhibition of new paintings by Venezuelan artist Bernadette Despujols. Despujols, who is now based in Miami, Florida and Brooklyn, New York, created this body of work as a meditation on her home country and her friends who, like the artist, immigrated from Venezuela to the United States. New paintings exploring memory, nostalgia, identity, and belonging, will be on view from September 16 – October 15, 2022 in Los Angeles.
Homesick features a series of portraits of the artist’s friends and family, all of whom have migrated from their home country to the United States. Despujols painted her subjects as they sat for her in her studio, but recontextualized them within domestic scenes typical of their hometowns in the paintings. After either receiving photographs of or researching the interiors and exteriors of houses typical of her friends’ hometowns, Despujols re-immersed her subjects within the spaces they are homesick for.
Mementos of the subjects’ histories crop up in each painting, from the CLAP box — a government-subsidized food distribution program — in Caja Clap, to the bust of Jose Hernandez – a Venezuelan saint and doctor—in Gala en La Comarca. Floor drains appear throughout the exhibition, as they are built into most rooms in Venezuelan homes to allow for easier cleaning and drainage, a feature absent in most houses in the States. The inclusion of such details reminds us of how the small conveniences, inconveniences, or quirks in our daily lives can be charged with nostalgia and longing once they recede into the past.
A sense of the haptic and palpable permeates the works, counterposing the subjects’ interest in intangible memories. After using thick gesso to create the compositions’ backgrounds, Despujols applies layers of paint with varying degrees of thickness and texture. She scrapes the canvas with knives and creates fine incisions to match the illusionistic space of the compositions with a surface depth that is equally complex. Skin often comes to resemble the wood of the surrounding interiors—a formal blending of person and environment that unites the subjects with their histories.
Bernadette Despujols (b. 1986, Barquisimeto, Venezuela; lives and works in Miami, Florida and Brooklyn, NY) studied Architecture at the Universidad Central de Venezuela and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France, and holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the California Institute of the Arts. Despujols’ artistic practice incorporates a wide range of different media, including painting, sculpture, video and installation. She has recently exhibited with Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY, US; Green Family Foundation, Miami, FL, US; Spinello Projects, Miami, FL, US; and LVL3 Gallery, Chicago, IL, US. Her work is represented in the collections of the ICA Miami, FL, US; and El Espacio 23, Miami, FL, US.