Emma Cousin’s figurative paintings feature dynamic, carnivalesque scenarios that explore the space between realism and fantasy, felt experience and communication. 

Responding to the limitations of language when used to articulate the complexities of human experience and emotions, Cousin considers how we might interact without it, in pre- or post-linguistic states. Taking this idea of ‘the failure of language to the ultimate point’, she imagines how the gestures of the body would now take over.

‘Introductions | Emma Cousin’ is curated by Capucine Perrot, Associate Director, Artist Liaison.

In Cousin's work, narratives are ambiguous, often double-edged, suggesting multiple potential interpretations of their mises-en-scène. Fluid and entropic, the human forms appear both erotic and sinister, merging and mutating in a sequence of primal interactions. Vividly coloured limbs stretch, contort and conjoin in endless permutations and the body, automaton-like, is transfigured into an assemblage of fleshy tools. 

These layered compositions, with their interweaving human forms, imply a breakdown of social structure, suggesting a more animalistic order. Tension is built by what Cousin has termed the ‘proximity to obscenity’, through figures that are at once cartoonish and menacing.

In Base Camp (2020), a group of partial figures are tightly packed against a dark background, their bodies emitting a glowing light, an effect rendered by allowing the painting’s raw primer to shine through. At the same time the perspective is skewed so that the ground is turned upright, as if we are inside a tent, peering down and into this confined space. 

Beginning with drawing, usually directly onto the canvas surface, Cousin’s works retain a strong, graphic quality, with the figures sharply delineated to anchor their place within the composition. Infilled with a palette of bold, pungent colours, the paintings have an insistently hallucinatory presence. Flesh takes expressly unnatural, incandescent tones — from rosy pink, to jaundiced yellow, with areas of deep purple or puce green invoking a sense of near noxious decay.

Gestures, in Cousin’s paintings, always have a dialectic potential: caressing becomes violent prodding, holding switches to pushing, so that affection and aggression are malleable conditions. The figures in Vaseline (2019), for example, seem curious yet remote, their actions intimate yet mechanical.

A theatrical sense of alienation is heightened by the use of single-coloured, graded backgrounds, rendered in shades of blue, grey or black to elongate shadows and provide a luminous backlight. These add to the notion of an apparition, of ungrounded figures without any specific details identifying time or place. Renaissance painting, the 18^th century still lifes of Luis Egidio Meléndez, and the ‘body conscious’ paintings of Maria Lassnig, are among the many reference points for these new works.