{"id":736,"date":"2021-05-26T08:58:51","date_gmt":"2021-05-26T00:58:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/?p=736"},"modified":"2021-05-24T10:05:49","modified_gmt":"2021-05-24T02:05:49","slug":"esteban-jeffersons-portraits-of-the-petit-palais","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/artist\/esteban-jeffersons-portraits-of-the-petit-palais\/","title":{"rendered":"ESTEBAN JEFFERSON\u2019S PORTRAITS OF THE PETIT PALAIS"},"content":{"rendered":"

When New York\u2013based artist\u00a0Esteban Jefferson<\/a>\u00a0first visited the\u00a0Petit Palais<\/a>\u00a0in Paris, in 2014, it was neither the nineteenth-century French paintings nor the Etruscan vases that caught his eye, but two mysterious portrait busts of anonymous Black figures placed behind the information and ticket desk. While most of the other artworks on display at the museum were accompanied by extensively researched wall texts, these sculptures, carved from polychrome marble, had no attribution and were simply labeled \u201cBuste d\u2019Africain.\u201d \u201cI shot a photo of one of them, came back to America, and thought about the image for a long time,\u201d Jefferson tells me. This photograph, along with others he took during subsequent visits to the museum in 2018 and 2019, serves as the basis for his ongoing body of work, \u201cPetit Palais.\u201d Comprising paintings and a video installation, the series, which Jefferson began while pursuing his MFA at Columbia University, was the focus of recent exhibitions at New York\u2019s White Columns, in late 2019, and at\u00a0Tanya Leighton<\/a>\u00a0in Berlin in 2020.<\/p>\n

For Jefferson, the \u201cPetit Palais\u201d paintings marked a turning point in his practice. \u201cIn all the paintings I made before going back to school and when I was working as an artist\u2019s assistant, I painted every square inch of the canvas,\u201d he says. \u201cIt got to a point where it was so laborious that it felt pointless.\u201d In these works, by contrast, he is more selective and considered, typically rendering the busts in exacting detail while leaving the rest of the scenes almost unfinished. In\u00a0Gratuit\u00e9<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(2019), for instance, Jefferson\u2019s treatment of the dark marble bust\u2014a woman with piercing white eyes and a pale peach headwrap\u2014is precise and unambiguous, contrasting with the sketch-like depiction of the sculpture\u2019s surroundings, including a disengaged worker at the ticket desk, vaguely outlined in light washes of color. \u201cIt has a punk-ness to it,\u201d Jefferson says of his series. \u201cI like the idea of refusing to paint in everything and only focusing on the part that deserves labor.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"Esteban<\/div>\n<\/div>
Esteban Jefferson:\u00a0Gratuit\u00e9<\/em>, 2019, oil on linen, 42 by 60 inches.<\/span>COURTESY TANYA LEIGHTON, BERLIN<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

The \u201cPetit Palais<\/a>\u201d series questions the representation of Black people in Western museums. Works like these sculptures \u201care put in this position where they\u2019re half art, but half not-art,\u201d Jefferson says, on display in the museum but not given space in the galleries or contextualized in wall labels or catalogues. Passersby show little interest in the busts, and the museum has put little effort into identifying them. Though the institution treats them with indifference, Jefferson considers the busts, thought to have been made in seventeenth-century Venice and donated by a collector in the 1940s, the most noteworthy works of art in the Petit Palais. \u201cThey stand out from everything in the museum and that\u2019s what made the treatment of them seem so strange to me,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

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\"Esteban<\/div>\n<\/div>
Esteban Jefferson:\u00a0Fl\u00e2neuse<\/em>, 2020, oil on linen, 66 by 84 inches.<\/span>COURTESY TANYA LEIGHTON, BERLIN<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Jefferson sees himself as a documentarian rather than a commentator. \u201cI obviously have my own position on how I feel about the work but I\u2019ve also tried to approach it in a journalistic way,\u201d he says. \u201cI always have a camera with me. I shoot a lot of film, and then get the rolls back and go through everything. It\u2019s nice to look through them and find things I hadn\u2019t noticed before.\u201d He treats these photographs as studies for the paintings, altering them in Photoshop to work out the ideal composition. Several paintings from the series depict visitors engaging in mundane tasks around the busts, based on scenes Jefferson witnessed at the museum. In\u00a0Tarifs R\u00e9duits<\/em>\u00a0(2020), for example, we see attendees gathering around the ticket desk to pay, while\u00a0Fl\u00e2neuse<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(2020) shows a woman staring at her phone, ignoring the adjacent sculpture. The video installation\u00a0Petit Palais<\/em>\u00a0(2019), which accompanied the paintings in the White Columns and Tanya Leighton exhibitions, juxtaposes footage of Jefferson turning the pages of the museum\u2019s information booklet against footage of the sculptures being ignored by other visitors, displayed on two stacked monitors. \u201cIt would be shocking to me if someone saw the entire \u2018Petit Palais\u2019 series and didn\u2019t understand what the issue is,\u201d he says, though he believes it\u2019s important to leave the paintings open to interpretation. \u201cI don\u2019t want the work to come off as overtly political. I think there\u2019s a lot of nuance to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

For an upcoming project commissioned by The Shed in New York, scheduled to open this summer, Jefferson is planning to create a group of new large-scale paintings dedicated to his friend Devra Freelander, a Brooklyn-based artist who died in a 2019 traffic accident while bicycling; the works will depict the makeshift street memorial created and maintained by Freelander\u2019s family and friends at the site of the accident as the tribute evolves over the course of a year. As with the busts at the Petit Palais, he is determined not to let it fade into the background.<\/p>\n

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Source\uff1ahttps:\/\/www.artnews.com\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When New York\u2013based artist\u00a0Esteban Jefferson\u00a0first visited the\u00a0Petit Palais\u00a0in Paris, in 2014, it was neither the nineteenth-century French paintings nor the Etruscan vases that caught his eye, but two mysterious portrait busts of anonymous Black figures placed behind the information and ticket desk. While most of the other artworks on display at the museum were accompanied […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":737,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,13,7,4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-736","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artist","8":"category-auction","9":"category-events","10":"category-gallery","11":"category-latest-news"},"yoast_head":"\nESTEBAN JEFFERSON\u2019S PORTRAITS OF THE PETIT PALAIS - Investable Art Auctioneer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When New York\u2013based artist\u00a0Esteban Jefferson\u00a0first visited the\u00a0Petit Palais\u00a0in Paris, in 2014, it was neither the nineteenth-century French paintings nor the Etruscan vases that caught his eye, but two mysterious portrait busts of anonymous Black figures placed behind the information and ticket desk.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/artist\/esteban-jeffersons-portraits-of-the-petit-palais\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"ESTEBAN JEFFERSON\u2019S PORTRAITS OF THE PETIT PALAIS - 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