Wine glasses (makes perfect sense), fans, windows, and within each painting iterations of the same figure as she moves through the space of the canvas. Toilet paper, shower heads, bathroom fixtures—all of the paintings were made in 2020 during quarantine where Josephine Messer worked alone in her studio, a single room where she also happens to live. In some cases, they are more abstracted—portions of hands and feet are visible. In others, there’s very clearly a woman in underwear. These figures appear almost like statues, at times with head in hands, despairing. This solitary actor, in a series of one-act plays, is possibly moving, possibly bored, but in all, she is very much hemmed in, a condition many of us can readily relate to.

The life of an artist (whose practice does not include a studio rammed full of assistants) is in ordinary times a lonely pursuit, confined among a crowd of inert canvases. Yet in the midst of an unprecedented stay-at-home pandemic, it becomes downright claustrophobic. In Messer’s new works, there are no friends, no romance, not even a dog or cat for company. This suite of paintings is less a diary of solitude, though that too, but rather a choreographed solo performance of a figure that leaps and contorts from one canvas to the next like related songs on a concept album. We are voyeurs watching a bathroom ballet unfold in 20 acts—the number of works that constitute this online show—an experience not too dissimilar from watching a progressive Pina Bausch or Alvin Ailey dance routine.

These works have a little Cecily Brown and Tracey Emin (less the drips) evident in the cheekiness of their cat and mouse game of mining for recognizable fragments like Where’s Waldo (or Wally depending in which jurisdiction you reside) and even Edvard Munch with the lush application and fluidity of paint. The fragments of bodies go in and out of focus in a push-pull tug of war with an acidic colored sea of abstract shapes and forms. These works benefit from prolonged viewing—when a figure does peek through, she is by herself and fleetingly comes and goes, simultaneously frozen and in motion. The colors are vivid, bordering on uncomfortable, comprised of yellows, greens, and blues—none of which are easy on the eye.

These paintings throw up more questions than they answer—are we witness to the artist herself in a state of alienation, holed-up in the bathroom, a box-sized room within an already constricted apartment/studio? This cramped, squatting body sitting on the toilet or floor, possibly writhing in pain, seems depressed but also beautiful and alluring. There is an undeniable psychological tension in a narrative that we never know; we can’t read her mind but feel her loneliness—a feeling many of us had to contend with during the initial confusion and disruption of lockdown life. There are signs of disassociation, rendered in waves of sweeping strokes of pigment that seduce the eye and mind. In the end we are left with a drama in paint that never unfolds but one that I could watch again and again. And plan to.

Kenny Schachter

Josephine Messer was born in 1991 in Los Angeles California and grew up primarily in Brooklyn New York. Messer received her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2014 and her MFA from Yale University in 2017. She has been a part of shows in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Messer currently lives and works in Brooklyn.