Chantal Joffe @ Arnolfini

This exhibition opened this week at the Arnolfini gallery, here in Bristol.

I had the pleasure to go on Friday 4 September, and to enjoy the very special emotions conveyed by these very intimate portraits and self-portraits.

My photos really don't do justice to the special feeling when entering Chantal Joffe's world, her intimate life with her daughter Esme and some reflections of her life in lockdown this year, including a lot of intimate moments, created by the painter with herself as a model, instead of the traditional object/subject/artist relationship. A rare female gaze on women's bodies, emotions and internal turmoil.

CHANTAL JOFFE : FOR ESME – WITH LOVE AND SQUALOR

Thursday, 3rd September 2020 to Sunday, 22nd November 2020, 12:00 to 17:00

Tickets for both Chantal Joffe and Hassan Hajjaj's exhibitions are released in a timely manner to accommodate other events taking place at Arnolfini allowing for social distancing considerations.

Free entry. Exhibition slots bookable in advance. → Book

The exhibition has been curated by Chantal Joffe, Dorothy Price, Gemma Brace and Arnolfini, and supported by Joffe’s gallery Victoria Miro.

Photos by myself:

Chantal Joffe: For Esme – with Love and Squalor, explores the intimate act of painting and portraiture. Taking its name from J.D. Salinger’s short story For Esmé – with Love and Squalor (1950) in which time hangs as heavy as the protagonist’s ‘enormous-faced chronographic-looking wristwatch’, the exhibition captures the changing faces across the years of Chantal and her daughter Esme, moving between mother and daughter, love and squalor, and the act of care and being cared for.

Including a number of new works (many produced whilst in ‘lockdown’), highlights include a series of portraits of Joffe’s daughter, from older works such as Esme (First Painting) captured as a new-born swaddled in blankets, to the later, defiantly awkward, Esme in White, painted within days of her sixteenth birthday this year.

These sit alongside a number of self-portraits, including the both intimate and monumental Bonnard inspired Reading in Bath I and III; never-before seen series Pictures of What I Did Not See, which depicts Joffe undergoing a traumatic illness and being cared for by Esme and a series of startlingly honest self-portraits. Produced one a day over the course of a year this 2018 series captures both the artist and her environment – from London’s cool winter light to the haze of a summer in the stifling New York heat.

The relationship between subject and place (specifically the domestic interior) and solitude and company within each of these works feels especially resonant. To paraphrase co-curator Dorothy Price, art historian and long-time collaborator of Joffe, Joffe’s work ‘traces a finger of time through the very act of being alive.’