Monique Mouton “The Theme is Green”

Bridget Donahue

This event has ended.

The theme is green. It kinda rhymes.

Green here could mean new or novice, and the Whole Earth Catalog thing. Green plants, green pants, green gold. There’s not an abundance of green in the show, so I think the title just lets you in on the attitude: I made this, I’m making this, this has been made. There’s an intimacy created by the works’ deep belief in the act of finding by doing.

Mouton uses lyrical color and soft figuration to invite us in. Her work calls to mind stain painting, color field painting, shape as medium painting, abstract landscape painting, and what was most recently called provisional painting. The frames, custom finished in a range of colors, add tension to the equation, pairing the washes with a solid thought.

In previous work, Mouton used a jigsaw to make irregularly shaped panels to paint on. Here she uses a blade to cut the paper. In both cases, the undulating cuts turn the surfaces into bodies and add to the works’ alien character.

Each painting combines the beautiful with the awkward, as color and composition give way to materiality. Mouton’s fuzzy forms, marks, edge-play, rips, drips, blank spaces and washy moods give the work a non-declarative open-endedness. I spend a lot of time thinking about the way in which one set of wet marks has dried, and how it comes into contact with another set of dried wet marks of the same or similar color.

The paintings are a little bit like how you would remember a painting in a dream. Atmospheric dissolves are punctuated by strange, funny shapes. There’s a delicate balance struck between deliberateness and casualness, restraint and action. As you spend more time with them, you feel these relationships more fully, and the paintings begin to grow on you. You stop replaying how these scenes came to be, and you accept this world.
-Eric Palgon, November 2018

Monique Mouton lives and works in New York, NY. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver, British Columbia and her Master of Fine Arts at the Milton Avery Graduate School at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. The Theme is Green is the second solo exhibition Mouton has held at Bridget Donahue. Mouton has exhibited widely nationally and internationally with exhibitions at Natalia Hug, Cologne; Klemm’s,
Berlin; Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver; Galeria Mascota, Mexico City; Ottawa Art Gallery, Ottawa; Fourteen30, Portland; Simon Lee, New York; Gladstone Gallery, New York; Metro Pictures, New York; Wallspace, New York; Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn; and many more.