Pages as conduits: Dominique Cheminais’ ‘Things Done While Dreaming’

A review by Misha Krynauw on the 14th of February 2023. This should take you 3 minutes to read.

THK
19.01 - 11.02.2023

Dominique Cheminais’ latest body of work sizzles at the intersection between literature’s fantasy-making and painting’s feverish feasting. Things Done While Dreaming is animated by Cheminais’ process, which is, in part, the artist’s decade-long commitment to the world of her writing mind. Using the pages of her own books as conduits, she gives form, if not outright life, to the subjects of her painter’s eye.

The title of the show speaks to the first book of Many Shallows, one of the artist’s novels, which has also informed the identities of various subjects across the exhibition. One particular character, Felice, is caught between fitful dreams and an ongoing draw to the depths of the woods near her home. Through the development of her dreaming, the character’s connection to a particular tree grants her the gift of her cat, and friend, Ottoline. The duo are captured in three works, the artist’s style melding well with her vision of abstracted shapes and broad, determinedly disjointed brushstrokes.

Dominique Cheminais, Opal-Ottoline, 2022. Courtesy of THK.

The exhibition of vividly coloured, generally larger-scale oil paintings are so immediately arresting, along with the dynamic and multi-level gallery space that is THK, that it took me two visits to get past the gnarls of my own ideas and assumptions and step into Cheminais’ vision. When it clicked was when I accepted her almost brutish dismissal of sense – or rather, a dismissal of the need for it. The collection does more than reach out from its own world; it creates portals into the lives of gangling otherlings, exorcisms and tea parties, with snapshots of desire and disaster alike.

The paintings are in many ways a continuation of, or elaboration on the creatures that speed through the artist’s trees. . With Felice Alone, the artist’s palette and linework shine. Against the darkness of the background, and the sparse but filling colour-lines that build her body, the subject is suspended in solitude, a feeling echoed by her story arc. It is a beautiful work depicting a character in a way that seems, to me, to honour both her suffering and her life’s tragedy, and the subsuming kind of calm that follows a cerebral freedom from life’s confines. There’s also something about Felice that reminds me of my favourite Valerie Desmore painting and, stylistically speaking, both artists occupy a sacrosanct group of ‘weirdos’ whose work I will always cherish.

To spend ten years not looking in, but living inside the world of a creative mind seems to have created a bond between the artistic forces of literature and linework for Cheminais. It’s the relationship that has developed in the in-between that impresses me the most. Trusting not one creative impulse, but two? Letting them fuse into something larger, with more entry points into which the audience can crawl is no small feat. Things Done While Dreaming feels like an ode to multiplicity, madness and reverie, beckoning us all closer to see what happens next. Whether it is another book (series) or gallery-full of artworks, I very much look forward to the parts of Dominique Cheminais’ world that I will be privy to next.