Alice Amati is pleased to present American artist Danielle Fretwell's second solo exhibition with the gallery. Tablescapes will be accompanied by a publication on the artist work including a new commissioned essay by Dr J. Cabelle Ahn.
“With an apple, I will astonish Paris,” Paul Cézanne once declared. The Frenchman’s bravado wasn’t just bluster; it hinged on his conviction that the most ordinary objects could, if represented in a visionary manner, prompt questions about the very basis of reality. Everyone knows what an apple looks like—until, suddenly, an artist invites them to see one in an entirely new way.
Danielle Fretwell’s richly symbolic still lifes likewise center on objects that should be as obvious as an apple. Apricots tumble down a white tablecloth, plums roll across a table set with vintage silver, and cherries in a claret bowl saturate the senses. It’s tempting to read these arrangements through the well-worn semiotics of vanitas—the crab as armor or temptation, the apricot as both Trinity and carnal desire, the cherry as spring, childhood, and resurrection.
But that interpretive reflex is also a trap. The work invites this exercise of legibility only to expose its contradictions. Roland Barthes reminds us that a drawing of a tree is really a “tree-being-looked-at.” Fretwell’s paintings press the point. What you see is never simply what is seen.
- Extract from Dr J. Cabelle Ahn essay
