The night is never black and Allison Blumenthal knows this, has seen it. Her series Night gardens makes this evident. You have to imagine the artist, mezzanotte on a balcony, unable to sleep, looking out to the lush plant-life that she loves so much. But there is no such thing as a tranquill insomnia, without a tightening of the chest, and the scene is deceiving. It is calm, but not. What we are seeing actually is anything but soothing and serene. We have anguished masses, flows, tangled shapes, knots, forces, tensions. It is almost brutal; loaded and troubling.

What is she painting? Gardens. But not the gardens that are in front of her, the pure exterior, but that which by contrast, by reaction, or in a sort of revelation, emanates from her, only appearing at night, in the inversion of normal conditions of vision. Her gardens don’t have a model, nor reference. They are neither French, nor English gardens. They aren’t perfectly organized, neatly arranged, made of clear lines and symmetries; nor are they gently winding, harmoniously wild, there is nothing picturesque about them. Allison Blumenthal is situated in the middle-ground, including in her way of painting: between structure, a sort of cadastre and geometry, and the ambiguous, the irregular, decomposition. Her verticals are never really vertical, curves wind in their singular way, shapes intersect, thicknesses and lengths vary: nothing can reassure the mind that is trying to find its bearings in order and normal coherence.

We can make out columns and arcades in these gardens - unless they are trees. For sure there is a sort of architecture-  arches, steps, frames, windows and elevated zones, but there is also something else. There is the organic and the machine. We see living organisms, or perhaps moribund, hybrid creatures, anomalies; one perceives perhaps ribs, carcasses, skulls, thoraxes, bursting abscesses that empty themselves, a disturbing energy that circulates; everything seems bony and visceral at the same time, solid and runny. There are stems, tubes, tanks, pistons, pumps, eruptions, smoke, instruments and strange mechanisms. The paintings are always on the edge of indecision, where their organization comes together and disintegrates, where the system comes apart, twists, fights against, or perhaps toward its collapse.

Allison Blumenthal experienced it during the night. It is paradoxal for a painter to have a relationship to the night, given that painting is color - which clearly is essential to her - and we think of darkness as obscuring it. But, she responds instead with the phosphorescence that we see in her paintings. Phosphorescence is the color of night that makes visible what the sun obscures. It not only liberates the compressed pain and subconscious of  the artist onto the canvas, but also allows us to dive into all that manifests, in her dislocated, monstrous, frightening version, the reality that we believe to have, or would like to have under control. Facing the garden, in darkness, phosphorescence reveals the other side of things. It reveals their violent truth, behind the mask, which is only visible at nightfall, as if the blinding light of pseudo-mastery and pseudo-organization ruling our chaotic lives during the day prevented its manifestation. Allison Blumenthal’s night makes visible what man does to the garden, meaning, to the world and to life. By painting, she unleashes the possibility of finding a way out. 

Jean-Baptiste Brenet