Continuing through September 6, 2025
Silhouetted against a wilderness vista, an actress contemplates a wildflower. “Ruminor“ (2025), a modest painting on panel, is Noelle Phares’s version of a still by the photographer James Abbe for the 1920 silent film “Love Flower.” The painting points to the artist’s interweaving concerns in “Salty and Dark”: her self-identity and the interface of the human and natural worlds.
In the fall of 2022, Phares spent five weeks in the South of France. Pregnant with her first child and concerned about the restrictions that motherhood might bring to her life, she found herself dwelling on her emotional state of mind. During that time, she conceived of the art in this exhibition, taking photographs as prompts for paintings she would later complete back home. Eventually, she wrote about each. “Ruminor,” she reveals, recognizes women and children’s attention to bits of nature that others might ignore. That matters to Phares. She holds degrees in biochemistry and environmental science. Yet during her pregnancy she often viewed the flora and fauna through the lens of her own past, present, and future.
“Ruminor” is Latin for “I ruminate.” That could be the title of each of the six works aligned with it. All are more-or-less monochromatic oval or round portraits based on those photographs. All have wallpaper-like borders. All include flowers or grasses. Together they present a nostalgic and essentialist view of childless womanhood. Based on Constant Puyo’s gauzy photographic double portraits, “You and Your Clouds” (2024) depicts two look-alike sisters holding a bouquet. As the artist explains, it symbolizes their intense connection, and we learn that the artist herself is an identical twin. “Cat Ladies” (2025) reveals an intimate moment between a lesbian couple and a white cat. Phares’s past includes romantic involvements with other women.
That set of paintings acts as the backstory for the landscapes that follow. Here Phares shifts from small to larger panels and widens her focus beyond private scenes to the Provençal places she loved. Among them was the Serre de la Madone (Greenhouse of the Madonna). “From the End of the World” (2025) surveys the former estate’s double reflecting pool and its architectural and botanical surroundings. Built in the 1920s and 1930s, the Serre de la Madone includes a series of terraced gardens riotous with botanical specimens from around the globe. Phares surehandedly depicts this human-ordered exuberance. The tips of drooping papyrus stems burst into pompoms. Late afternoon light rakes three cypress trees. Reflections of plants and sky mingle. The painting’s vertical and horizontal near symmetry, with a statue at its crux, enhances the aura of tranquility.
In other landscapes, the artist’s feeling for topography and expertise about water, rock, and vegetation serve her well. “Tumbling Toward the Sea” (2025) depicts a hillside carpeted with shrubs and trees interrupted by picturesque structures. It sweeps down to a cove where swimmers bob in the water, here cloudy, here clear, here salty and dark. Phares renders the sea as a luscious scramble of greens and blues, ochres and whites.
Some works break stride. Among them are the scenes painted on four ostrich eggs displayed on vintage brass stands (all 2025). These honor the jeweled objets d’art created by Fabergé for the Russian imperial family at the turn of the 20th century. Conceivably, they reprise the theme of nostalgia and motherhood, but that’s a stretch. “Liption” (2025) combines views of a Belgian nunnery and a field of daffodils, with a portrait of a cat who came with the house that Phares rented in France. The painting’s contrived, incongruous subject matter and stylistic shifts undermine its appeal.
By contrast, six understated works on unstretched cotton canvas reward close attention. Most are light-splashed scenes of rock formations, cascading water, and a profusion of plant life. The exception is “Bones of High Nice” (2025), depicting an ancient cemetery graced with broad allées, stone angels, and a vista of the city. All six combine acrylic with ink and sometimes colored pencils, which the artist uses for twiggy effects and precise description. She has applied gesso only to the areas she paints. Elsewhere, the knobbly canvas lies exposed like open sky. The effect is subtly atmospheric.
Included are Phares’s texts about how these scenes expressed her inner life during pregnancy. Perhaps more than the other works in the exhibition, they also invite viewers into the artist’s imaginary worlds. Their spatial openness and contemplative manner create an opportunity for us to linger and indulge their own ruminations about past, present, and future.
