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Charlotte Houette

Magic Colour

New Low is pleased to present Magic Colour, an exhibition of new works by Charlotte Houette. 

For many years, Houette’s wall works have featured a window, a door, a portal, or a passageway. I always read this as some joke about painting, a sort of in-your-faceness about “creating worlds,” as opposed to responding to a real world, as photography and sculpture tend to do. Yet when I first encountered the work, I didn’t even consider them paintings, rather they were sculptures that hung on the wall - dollhouse parts, excavation remains, habitat for humanity supplies. 

But over the last years, Houette has gone all-in on painting. Ever a contrarian, Houette’s commitment to painting appears as neither figurative nor expressionistic abstraction, but instead as hard-edged, psychedelic, geometric abstraction (read as: Op-Art). Where once a literal window might have appeared in her wall-hung rectangles, now a panel, akin to a children’s book, sits where moveable slats reveal another image, or pattern, or colour combination through this created interior space. In terms of a kinship with kids’ stuff, wonder remains, but naivité does not - they’re eerie, pointed, and often (literally) pretty twisted. 

For this latest, and potentially last series of the moveable panel paintings, Houette has given us five of the trippiest, most super-charged, fluorescent works to date. But rather than day-glo, the colours are actually inspired by Magic Changing Markers (Hamley’s brand, specifically), a novelty art making medium for children, where a “magic”, “white” marker changes the shade of the original markers’ pigments. Similarly, Houette’s central panels of canvas also change, albeit mechanically, but maintaining a magic in their own making. Eschewing expectations, these works’ “windows” are also the first non-rectilinear ones to feature in the work, adding another layer of bizarro perspective, à la Hanna Barbera. The result is poppy, pleasing, jarring and potentially nauseating. 


Charlotte Houette (b. 1983, Chambray-lès-Tours, France)  is a Scorpio Sun, Taurus Moon and Virgo Rising. Recent exhibitions include High Art, Paris/Arles (solo) and Fondation Vincent Van Gogh (group). Magic Colour is her first solo exhibition in the United States. She lives and works in Paris.