Solange Roberdeau: Beyond Latitude

Municipal Bonds is pleased to present Beyond Latitude, a solo exhibition of recent works on paper by Bay Area artist Solange Roberdeau. In this selection of reductive drawings, abstract forms reference shapes, happenings, and cadences of the natural world. Responding to nature in its distilled yet fluid form, Roberdeau explores moment and movement within various geography through gestural mark-making. 

Adhering to a monochromatic or minimally colorful palette, shapes identify with an organic sensibility, orderly and wild. Geometry and negative space provide grounding, and contrast with the unfettered freedom of patterning, dripping, and the marbling of Suminagashi. Within these energetic exchanges, diptychs and series are joined together by the line, traversing space and holistically present.

This interconnection of artist and environment—the sightline between interior and exterior—is at once existential in Roberdeau’s work:

“When I am at home in Northern California, I often find myself on walks along the shoreline of the Pacific Ocean. In the rhythm of choosing and discarding—rocks, metal, bones, wood—I am reminded that these objects are simultaneously influencing my movements, my thinking. Similarly, impetus and energy were extended from different locales to inspire this body of work.

Time spent in residence at the Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut motivated the pairing of economical, geometric shapes with organic forms in Interjections W, V, B (1-9); while the distinctive movements and checkerboard patterning of magpies, prolific in Northern New Mexico, are reflected in the woven series: A Parliament (1), A Parliament (2), and Ebb.

Into the upheaval of 2020, I was making the drawings that are the Continuity... series—the repetition of a temporal line, persistent and predictable, paired with spontaneous and less predictable mark-making. September Complex came on a smoky afternoon during the historic August Complex fire caused by California's increasing, multi-year droughts that continue to beg for A Water Song.

Traveling between different environments, the only constant is one’s self. Take away this perception of selfhood, and I am solely an aspect of the landscape under a high desert sky, or another movement in the neon green density of eastern foliage. Birds scatter on the other side of a window, and it is my mental landscape that also scatters and regathers, so that I stop what I am doing and am moved to ask, what moved them?

Beyond Latitude speaks to perception and place, and also to the nuanced pairings that make up moments, to the calls and to the responses. It is a group of drawings about the spark-quick spaces between serendipity and order, and between mental projection and stopping to look again.”—Solange Roberdeau

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