Jack Barrett is pleased to present Lengthy Fall, Québécois artist Caro Deschênes’ inaugural show with the gallery, and first solo presentation in New York. In Lengthy Fall Caro Deschênes meditates on life and death, observing natal and fatal moments as possibly infinite. Blooming colours and overflowing shapes appear to nearly breathe on the canvases, brightnesses bulging and shadows collapsing into one another. In this new series, Deschênes continues to move away from obvious figuration and towards abstraction, making space to talk about life and death beyond corporeal bounds. The few figurative references to life (The Womb) and death (Female Carcass) are tenuous, the forms not quite as expected, paint pulling apart their edges and expanding to the fullness of the canvas.

Influenced by the textures and colors of the Canadian North, Deschênes’ paintings conjure the mossy softness of the earth and the shadowy edges of rocky outcroppings. Much like the sub-boreal forests where light filters through woods, the artworks show how remote and obscure memories haunt the clarity of the present. At times the paintings take on the quality of fabric, draped and pooling, moving in all directions and folding in on themselves, the layers beneath just as alive as those on the surface.

The distinct momentum in the paintings comes from Deschênes’ method—one initiated by the impetus of feeling and executed by the paintbrush—whereby the images and ideas that first inspired a painting are accentuated or minimized by physical intuition, often springing from one canvas to become the subject of the next. There’s a reciprocal relationship between the canvases by which the subjects and emotions considered are interconnected like a network of veins.

Deschênes' work brings a vitality to life’s biggest questions and carefully considers what it means to love and grieve in both life and death. The paintings bridge internal and external worlds as they express the unnameable and tidal nature of pain, flowing between fragmented memory and vivid visions of the future. The paintings in Lengthy Fall act like different translations of the same poem, a nearly obsessive reconsideration of this same question of mortality.

-Ella Ramsay