Ten columns are installed throughout the space. Vertical monoliths composed of enamelled ceramic tiles, they provoke awkwardness as a result of being depositaries of evolving, organic painterly processes and at the same time maintaining a totemic Minimalist-coded fixture, like John McCracken's polished towers resurfaced after erosion. But maybe they’re closer to Anne Truitt’s boxes, considering how their formal rigidity and phallic verticality paradoxically generate the most organic appearance.    

Séverine Heizmann Pozza’s practice draws on various interconnected systems: permaculture, ecology and divination. These shape dynamic structures made up of their own logics of transmission, as many complex sites which are thought of as nodes of overlapping interdependent zones, articulated by a site-responsive painting. The unpredictability and openness of ceramics, whose outcome is only revealed through the thermochemical process of the kiln—painting in the dark— answers those dynamic ecosystems by stating its own elsewhere, an autonomous site of fluxes and exchanges. Firmly closed when the firings take place, the kiln itself looks like a reactor of some sort, enclosing the radiation which effects the material: the surfaces are at times oxidated, due to the effect of a corrosive reaction, or show stronger material transformations through vitrification. Their colours further insist on the narrative of contamination: the luxurious fading palette of guppy blues, muddy browns, deep chartreuse and troubled aquamarine greens contrast with acidic oranges and red’s radiance due to the cadmium’s toxicity. The colors seem to owe their tint to outside processes. Consider the reduction leading to a metallic black, seemingly illuminated from inside, as if it owed its depth to some arcane power. Just as Riga Black Balsam isn’t Picon, it could happen that one black looks like another but doesn’t taste the same.

These displacements give them a feeling of exteriority reinforced at Kim?, appearing both as individuals and as a group, strangely repeating the space’s own pilasters, the structures seem withdrawn, cut off from the world. A separation which is further pushed by the organicity and outwardness of the works, which detach them from modernist sculpture. Consider how they reflect on each other when they’re close. They radiate outwards, absorb and redistribute. Their togetherness and seclusion are akin to the immanence of a rave, where, at the same time, nothing exists outside, and the end is inescapable. Set within this fleeting feeling of furtiveness, Settling at Dawn works as a time of grounding and resurrection. A germinal emergence, or as the first thing one sees after having come through the night. 

I’ve been mostly talking about interdependence to understand how this “painting in an expanded field” manoeuvres a new consideration about the site, its complexity and heterogeneity. If an ecological consideration can be useful here, it is for the articulation of present thinking about the interdependence of events and processes in light of external disturbances: the sites we inhabit seem more and more unstable, from increasing shaky geological foundations to the return of full-fledged wars to geographies believed to be fixed. Against an isolating perspective, the various systems the artist calls upon lead to a consideration of the site in its multiplicity, as expanded nodes linked by multiple interdependent processes. By setting up a practice rooted in this contemporary thought, Séverine Heizmann Pozza elaborates a painterly agency which looks at accumulating thought and matter into a series of transformations and mutations, a hybridisation of the medium through contagion of knowledge. The exhibition’s spatiality itself becomes a site of meaning: consider the conjunctions of the structures throughout the space, mapping out a seemingly informative chart, like astral signs, and divination as a tool to reconfigure the given site. 

Anne Truitt: “Have a feeling of having seen it all—all phenomena of whatever kind, a feeling of being exhausted with living—a fleeting impression of the ephemeral nature of actuality—as if the actual had ceased to interest me, and the virtual had silently usurped its place in my thought.”

Text by Paolo Baggi

Supported by Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, Pro Helvetia, State Culture Capital Foundation, Republic and Canton of geneva, Riga City Council, City of Lancy, Fondation Engelberts, Kokmuiža, Media Port.