Defections

cadet capela is pleased to present Molly Greene’s first solo exhibition in France. For the past few years, the American artist has been questioning the standards by which we define the world around us:

I’ve been generally thinking about creating objects that are ontological failures; entities that fail to fall neatly into a single category or entities that disturb the viewer’s impulse to taxonomize.

Her paintings are filled with “objects” that do not match what we expect them to be. They seem to be imbued with nature but are not really recognizable. Those that could be considered plants are remarkably formalised and often symmetrical, giving them an unusual dogmatic dimension. These abstract forms, which look botanical or organic, occupy almost the entire canvas, imposing their self-sufficient presence in a timeless space.

The main subjects that dominate the canvases are infused with worlds imagined by Greene, displaying alien forms that are unattached to anything and floating in an undefined dimension. The artist’s influences are varied and may come from animated films such as Suzan Pitt’s film Asparagus, René Laloux’s La Planète Sauvage, the films of Studio Ghibli or the work of the Outsider Artist Anna Zemankova who “grew flowers that don’t grow anywhere else”.

Greene’s works create a vibrant and hypnotic atmosphere in which the thin, diffuse layers of paint blend and merge into a highly recognisable pastel palette. These powdery waves of colour suspend time; they dissolve the fixed structure of the objects and exacerbate the artist’s cherished sense of ambiguity. Uncertainty then condemns the precise description of these forms, which remain free and not limited by thought.

Molly Greene’s fundamental preoccupations, taxonomy and ontology, deal respectively with the description in the natural sciences of the diversity of living organisms and the study in philosophy of the beings themselves, their existence, their possibility, their becoming. The title of the exhibition, Defections, emphasises the desire to escape from all categories and classifications. The exhibition thus invites us to wander through another world, a nature reserve whose entities do not follow the rules imposed by our rational minds.

Molly A. Greene is an American artist born in 1986 in Cornwall, Vermont. She now lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She spent ten years studying before turning to art. In 2013, she received her MESc in Environmental Science from Yale University. In 2019 she completed her PhD in American Studies at Yale University. During her many years of study, she tackles various topics such as gender and sexuality, post-humanism or animal studies, among others. She started exhibiting her work as an artist in 2018 in the United States.