Sophie Larrimore: Better Once Than Never

Stepping into the paintings of Sophie Larrimore, one is pulled into the past and back into the future. At an intersection of what we think we know, and what we think we would like to know, Larrimore presents a pictorial world where fragments of logic belong to different points in both lived and proposed times. 

The paintings are predominantly figurative, with elements of abstraction that blend into a concoction unlimited by the measurements of a single recipe. Known for repeating stylistic figures in a composition of both flat and three-dimensional qualities, Larrimore references a wide range of artistic traditions, from hieroglyphs to illuminated manuscripts, ancient reliefs, and impressionist landscapes. Working within an area of selected and compiled sources, she explores imagery within a perimeter equally fluctuating as self-imposed.

For the exhibition Better Once Than Never at Galleri Golsa, Larrimore presents a new series of paintings that teases a shift in her practice. The perspective is still rendered in an undeterminable hybrid of the flat and the three-dimensional, and the figures still carry their stylistic properties, yet they now seem to have been given a consciousness. Slowly and in different stages of relational play, they appear to be in an early phase of exploring both themselves and the space they find themselves within. It is almost as if Larrimore has placed them there, and they now begin to move on their own.  

We see the dog, more specifically the poodle, depicted again and again, over and over, in the same shape and the same size. Small pellets dotted in subtle variations compose their form and movement. In profile, lying down, seated frontally, tilted, upside down, or rotated in a half-turn. Their eyes are merely indicated, and their mouths only a slither, either empty or with a thin, pointy tongue and teeth. Accompanied by an equally repeated female nude, they proceed to investigate the logic of their surroundings in joined forces. Whereas the poodle remains in variations of almost identical form, the humans seem to encompass an additional force - one that seeks to break out of its predicted formality. Kneeling, crouching, crawling up, overlapping, diving down, then only a head. Partially dissecting their bodies and movements, Larrimore proceeds to dissolve our accustomed perception of pictorial reasoning. 

With an emphasis on the tactility of painting, Larrimore uses solid, carved frames in some of her works. Not dependent but occasionally present, the shifting dialogue between the canvas and the frames extends the physicality of the work. Seen in relation to the stylistic features of the depicted figures, one can think of Assyrian reliefs, Roman sarcophagi, and altarpieces of the Early Modern. If carved into a wall, a block of stone, or painted onto a panel, the development of pictorial motifs entails an inherently physical past with a blurred border between the categorization of painting and object – one that Larrimore recollects. 

From the physical to the conceptual, referencing the tactile memory of the medium calls upon yet another way of imagining space. As Assyrian reliefs portrayed the gods, Roman sarcophagi housed the dead, and altarpieces of the Early Modern depicted the divine - death, afterlife, and devotional ideals have long roamed the narratives of pictorial matter. Reflecting our obsessions, the saturated presence of a dimension lying beyond the one we proclaim to grasp can also be said to have found a seat here. Here, where the worlds of Larrimore muddle our conception of what is up from what is down, moving left or right, towards us or into itself. Presented with a space where the laws of nature no longer apply, what we might face, then, is a site where also life no longer abides by the limits of ours, or one where we have already transposed. 

Occupied with the idea of non-narratives, Larrimore initiates a sensation of emerging chaos by withholding a conform storyline. Standing before the new series of paintings, we find ourselves on the verge between multiple fractions of known territory that somehow present themselves anew. By actively refusing successional narratives, the paintings are prone to read as something else – something perhaps in the shape of a map or as directions to a place we have not heard of or into a state we do not know of. Constantly challenging the normative conditions of her medium, Larrimore pulls, twists, and flips her subjects within an alternating reality that speaks with the fabric of our own.