NEW YORK, NY.- Almine Rech New York, Tribeca is presenting 'Skin of a Storm', Inès Longevial's third solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from June 26 to August 1, 2025.
Inès Longevial's oil paintings draw attention to the skin, layered in seemingly smooth swatches of ultramarine, crimson, slate, chantilly, and mauve. These self-portraits—composed mostly from memory, informed by a repository of textures and forms consulted prior to their emergence—are a method of situating the artist in herself and the world. They are painted with urgency and oftentimes completed in one sitting. In this flow-state, the female form becomes a surface littered with subtle footnotes, like an odd wrinkle in a pleated skirt or the deep crease of a dog-earred page. A cropped face with down-turned eyes, a punctuated nipple, and a scapula blooming like an iris are, at a distance, totemic. The stoic sitters are disassociated, fermented. Upon closer inspection, hot-pink contour or blankets of honey light, feathered by the dry bristles of the artist's paintbrush, generate a supple, saturated landscape. Longevial offers an extreme perspectival shift through her impulsive markmaking upon the skin, often surprising herself. Her own experience living with myopia (extreme nearsightedness) is relayed to the viewer with grace, transforming skin into a woven surface, a microcosm, within the seemingly smooth composition of each painting. Wrapped in the tangible shimmer of the surface, unconcerned with matching the eye of the viewer, Longevial's sage subject is unconcerned with the viewer's yearning to define, place, or ingest her.
Inès Longevial, Body as beach map, 2025. Oil on linen canvas - diptych, 161.9 x 220.3 x 3.8 cm (each) 63 3/4 x 86 3/4 x 1 1/2 in (each). © Inès Longevial. Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech.
Longevial's drawings make an arresting shift, directly addressing the viewer with deadpan eyes and a seemingly dimensionless face in a tight crop of the eyes, nose, and mouth. In one set, an inverted pelvis is perched upon the lips, with spread legs engulfing the nose in a diamond shape, heels touching at the bridge. In another set, howling wolves replace the nose and a deep plié surrounds the lips. Within the sublime uniformity of the face, a cast of characters narrativizes the legacy of living in flashes of allegory. Ballet slippers are odes to flippant adolescence, while butterflies and snakes allude to metamorphosis. An anthropomorphized house and flower-headed femme throw us off the scent of such simplicity, however—these drawings serve as mythic self-reflection, nodding to place-making, masking, fear, transition, and freedom. Like petite prayer cards, each face is a theater and a mirror. Rather than scars or wrinkles, the imagery emanating from each face is grounded in experience, tethered to what the viewer cannot know behind the eyes.
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— Lynn Maliszewski
Inès Longevial, Red Figure 2, 2025. Oil monotype on paper, 31.2 x 29.7 cm - 12 1/2 x 11 1/2 in (unframed), 48.3 x 53.3 x 3.8 cm - 19 x 21 x 1 1/2 in (framed). © Inès Longevial. Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech.
