Ain't Misbehavin'
Nicole Wittenberg à la Maison La Roche
13 June — 19 July 2025
Ain’t Misbehavin’ presents a series of paintings by Nicole Wittenberg developed from her preparatory sketches made outdoors in pastel. They capture the pleasures of a garden in bloom, but also the desire to capture these fleeting moments in the form of impressions, as these works represent a phase of development between the immediacy of painting on the motif and the memory work required to reconstruct the painting in the studio. This process suggests a correlation between transience and profound presence. Although created outside the “field,” these works are animated by a dynamic movement that defines a psychic and emotional space, while retaining the energy of the encounter. They seek to convey emotions that are difficult to grasp, fleeting and ephemeral moments, a universal yet difficult-to-express feeling of selfless connection with the natural world, as well as a sense of empathy towards other forms of life.
This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the gallery MASSIMODECARLO.
The works are vibrant. Botanical figures twist, writhe, and spin across the picture plane, pushing against the edges of the canvas. In these works in particular, Wittenberg brings the painted surface closer to the textures of local elements—leaves, stems, petals, bark—establishing a visual polyrhythm that echoes his often-mentioned love of jazz. Like jazz, his works are syncopated; they express an offbeat cadence. Jazz, a genre that is difficult to define, is constantly evolving, and this ephemeral, temporal, changing essence is found in Wittenberg’s work. Like jazz, her canvases are neither rigorously composed nor totally improvised: she follows a musical logic that allows her a certain freedom of expression, while emphasizing touch and feeling. Like the movement of a voice in a song—Billie Holiday’s, for example, in her 1958 rendition of Ain’t Misbehavin’, in perfect style—Wittenberg’s pictorial approach invites multiple ways of looking that transcend or circumvent empirical ways of observing—and relating to—phenomena in nature.
Sarah Messerschmidt
Nicole Wittenberg. “Climbing Roses 2” (2024). Oil on canvas, 72" x 84".