PRESS RELEASE
LUCY JANE TURPIN: Tender seasons of intimacy // Tenere stagioni d’intimità
Apr 9 – Apr 30, 2025
Tender seasons of intimacy // Tenere stagioni d’intimità, a solo exhibition by Lucy Jane Turpin.
Opening reception: Wednesday 9th April - 6pm
Tender seasons of intimacy
4
Bodies
bound by the laws of physics
We take space
only to reach so far
What is deepest (intimus) is always deepening.
Breasts, toes, warm mouths, dreams
in the dark, we offer what is soft.
How quickly a whisper blurs the edges of matter[1]
Can abstraction pull us out
into the same palm[2]
1
Tender –
gentle, kind
delicate, attuned
careful
burning.
Scars grow numb to touch but
the desire, the restraint
to press a bruise.
If we asked what we loved, what we lusted
where it feels a trace
would we remember how to kiss it better
would we remember how to kiss
would we remember
5
What if
in The Beginning, there was not Time
but the idea of Time
To be imagined –
is this not the first stage of existence?
Just as a conversation starts not with speech
but with listening[3]
If we were to press our ear to the canvas,
whose ecstasy, whose confession, whose beginning
would we hear?[4]
3
Are We tender enough
Do We dare disturb the universe?[5]
2
Barthes, Derrida, Zambreno —
Writing consumed by the presence of absence
But what is it to paint absence?
Winter, only an abstraction of Spring
the unsaid, more intimate than the said
Ambiguous, anonymous seasons occur at the precipice.
Without language,
is an image only faithful to itself?[6]
7
In fairytales, a kiss can resuscitate
Might we believe,
the same is true for paintings
6
To gaze at a painting may cost a man his faith[7]
but not his tenderness.
Tenderness knows –
we can miss someone before they have arrived
there is soft tissue between knuckles
Nothing is immune to sorrow.
In sand, in snow, in water – why is it we fly on our backs?
Has tenderness not always been,
a way of sinking, as we look up
Written by Robyn Perros in collaboration with the artist
1 “Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns, and remembers” – Karen Barad in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (2012) by Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin
2 tendre (adj. /t??d?/) from Anglo-French meaning softness, delicacy, or love. tendre (v. /t??d?/) from French meaning to offer, to stretch, to hold out
3 Lipari. L. 2014. Listening, Thinking, Being: Towards an Ethics of Attunement. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press
4 “Tenderness is entering into a relationship with someone who is not me” — Olga Tokarczuk, The Tender Narrator, translated by Jennifer Croft and Antonia Lloyd-Jones, from Nobel Lecture (2019)
5 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' by T.S. Eliot. Collected Poems 1909-1962 (1963)
6 “Tenderness is the most modest form of love… spontaneous and disinterested; it goes far beyond empathetic fellow feeling. Instead it is the conscious, though perhaps slightly melancholy, common sharing of fate” — Olga Tokarczuk (2019)
7 Reference to the painting 'Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb' by Hans Holbein (1521) which reportedly had a profound impact on Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky when he encountered it during a visit to Basel in 1867. According to Anna, his wife, Dostoevsky was deeply moved and disturbed by the painting, standing before it for hours, transfixed.
