Johanna Dumet

Johanna Dumet paints in oil and oil stick on canvases prepared with rabbit-skin glue and often sketched in charcoal, mixing her own colours and holding to classical technique. Her subjects are the things around her: tables laid with food, coffee, wine and cigarettes, fruit, vegetables and flowers, household objects, interiors and portraits. She often begins by laying down colour, then reads objects and situations from lived experience into the abstract forms that appear, painting quickly and without correcting form or colour. The result is bold colour, playful pattern and irony, in constant movement between abstraction and figuration, touching on the comic, the psychedelic and the peculiar. A background in fashion sharpens Dumet's attention to material, and her work extends into unframed canvases that hang like textiles, gouache, collage, stitching and hand-painted tarot cards.