Here comes the night / Spencer Brownstone Gallery, 2022, New York City, US

„The dance between restraint and audacity, austerity and material lushness, is integral to the slow looking these paintings quietly insist upon. At a time when entertainment and distraction have become a large part of the art world’s presentations, Korneffel’s belief in paint and painting, the relationship between the optical and interiority, underscore her rejection of the different overarching narratives regarding abstraction. Rather than connecting herself to a theory, she has pursued the thoughtful pleasures that only a painting, its combination of the visual and the physical, can embody.“

„The Pleasure of Slow Looking“ by John Yau, Hyperallergic, March 13, 2022

„On the cloudless afternoon that I visited, the verso of The Unicorn in its Garden (at Night) faced the gallery’s pebble-strewn courtyard space. Hanging on a cinderblock wall outside was the large Sky, Sun and Moon in a Giotto Fresco (Looking Southern on 2nd Ave)(2021). Against a predominantly dark-turquoise field, a ball of light-purple marks glows in the bottom right corner, and dash of pale yellow hangs in the top left. Shaded from direct sun by city buildings, the painting found light that was soft and even, yet remained perceptibly alive to the passage of natural time.“

Brooklyn Rail, Art Seen: Jule Korneffel: Here comes the night, by Andrew L. Shea, April, 2022

„In Jule Korneffel: Here comes the night at Spencer Brownstone (February 26–April 16, 2022), her second with this gallery, the artist’s palette has become dark, somber, and moody. Jettisoning the joyous palette of her first show, with its pinks and pale blues, these new works are dominated by blacks, grays, dark greens, and rust reds. But to my mind, it is not just the palette that Korneffel has changed. If the lines and shapes in her first show were clear, and there was a sense of stability to the work, these paintings seem to be about fleeting glimpses and ghostly presences.“

„The Pleasure of Slow Looking“ by John Yau, Hyperallergic, March 13, 2022

„Is the dark red shape in the lower left side the “Another Tragic Moment in History” the detail of a flower still life that Korneffel refers to in the title? If so, what is the dark world it inhabits but our present, marked by constant conflicts and tribalism? And yet, rather than becoming cynical, the artist adheres to her belief in art, specifically abstract painting.“

„The Pleasure of Slow Looking“ by John Yau, Hyperallergic, March 13, 2022

„Today people speak of a “golden hour,” when the sun is low on the horizon and emits a soft, warm light, as the best time to snap a selfie. For his part, Pierre Bonnard preferred “l’heure bleue” occurring immediately after sunset. In this transient moment of paradoxical stillness, ambient light reflects off the sky and bathes the world in cool, hushed tones, causing nature to appear almost as if illuminated from within. One can guess why this appealed to Bonnard, whose paintings emit not the depicted effects of some external light source, but rather their own more mysterious and internal glow.“

„Jule Korneffel: Here comes the night“ by Andrew L. Shea, Brooklyn Rail, April issue, 2022

This notebook documents my research into the phenomena of darkness, twilight, color, optics, and philosophy. It was developed alongside the painting process for the series “Here Comes the Night” and was displayed at the gallery counter throughout the duration of the exhibition.

Press release:

Spencer Brownstone Gallery is pleased to present Here comes the night, Jule Korneffel’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The show features eight new paintings developed during a period of isolation and primarily but not exclusively in the darker hours of the day. In contrast to her first exhibition here, the works feature darker shades and are more rooted in the western tradition of painting.

Early in their inception, a significant source of inspiration for this body of work were Monet’s Water Lilies. The depiction of water was crucial to her investigation into color and layering. Only a vehicle for the light, water itself has no color yet we see it, not just in one static hue but in ever-changing multitudes of tones. Water is surface and depth, much like Korneffel’s paintings, where the initial flash of color might shift at different angles and in different light, through discreet yet deliberate washes of paint.

Korneffel’s pivot to darker tones came from two sources. One being the direct observation of light in her studio, with work on the series primarily done in the twilight hours when the sun sets and the light fades. The other is a renewed captivation with the chroma found in the Western canon. Within this series underlie a more direct connection to the Old Masters including Giotto, Botticelli, Bellini, Vuillard, Monet, and Rothko, and the unnamed 15th century creator of the Unicorn Tapestries.

These paintings for Korneffel are a revisit to her European roots in life and in art education. If her first exhibition at the gallery (here comes trouble, 2019) established a style based on American mark making and reductive abstraction grounded in original introspection, Here comes the night reaches out to recognizable scenes and archetypes that can be found in the collections of major museums. The tones, compositions, and symbols are severe yet familiar (which Korneffel supposes were an unconscious balm to the stress of those months).

As was the case with the first exhibition, the phrase “Here comes the night” is both portentous and heraldic. We will have to wait and see what the darkness brings. Working with darker tones revealed a different painting process for Korneffel. The dark tones resisted the light and often frustrated her like a riddle to be solved. With time and immersion, Korneffel ultimately found that they unfold in darkness. “Wenn die Nacht am tiefsten ist der Tag am nächsten” is a German idiom which, in meaning, translates to something like “In the deepest night, the day is nearest.”