Why the Butterflies

MASSIMODECARLO is pleased to present _Why the Butterflies_, Nicole Wittenberg's first exhibition in Asia. The new paintings of coastlines, flowers and gardens at dusk are each made in a single day and never reworked, painted in the narrow window before a feeling becomes tangible. The final track is called _Why the Butterflies_ and the entire album was continuously playing while Wittenberg painted the works for this show. The parallel is exact: each canvas made in a single take, never touched again. This fits naturally into the practice Wittenberg has been developing from the start, built on the conviction that _immediate sensation_ is painting's real subject. Working first in pastel _en plein air__,_ Wittenberg has developed a way of moving from the drawing to the painting without losing the momentum of the present. In this sense, the paintings are not observational, but rather the product of allowing an image, space, and encounter to endure. Wittenberg describes this as "the way things look when my eyes are closed". The exhibition includes paintings of various scales. For the smaller works, the method is striking, painted with a broom, the same type she uses for much larger paintings, she compresses a wall-sized gesture into something intimate, likening the experience to \"dancing on a handkerchief.\" Some of the works come from the coast of Maine, where the artist has returned to for years. This landscape has become a site of accumulated knowledge held in the body. _Dark Harbour 3_ is a painting of a small island on a lake in Maine just after sunset, an image the artist has been engaged with for years. While the image _Night Bloom_, is from her friend's apartment in Paris, the original pastel was from memory, "I was painting what I remembered of the hot summer night, three tulips just about to lose their petals. I was trying to return to a fleeting moment.\" _Seat of Buddha 2_ was made at dusk in the mountains of Thailand. This image was a response to the Buddhist proverb: the lotus rises from the mud to become a jewel. What can a painting do in a particular moment in time? Wittenberg has said, \"that chord between what's happening outside and what's happening inside you is never actually cut. In uncertain times I think painters instinctively go back to nature, back to the intimate. Not for escape but for proof.\" The natural world, here, is not a retreat from the turmoil of society but a way of steadying oneself within it — a place where feeling still has weight, temperature, consequence, where solid ground can still be found, and with it, affirmation. Wittenberg has spent years moving through Southeast Asia, and _Why the Butterflies_ is her first exhibition in the region. It is perhaps inevitable that this work, committed to the interior life of places, to what lingers in the body after the eye has moved on, is finding its moment in a city that holds multiple worlds at once. The question in the title was never meant to be answered. It was meant to be felt.