![](https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/1.-jj70723-banner-detail-3.jpg?w=960&h=720&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676472867&s=89086f54f41f2acf497c218edf6c554b 960w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/1.-jj70723-banner-detail-3.jpg?w=1280&h=960&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676472867&s=ea40752d22597ede2ffe516bab564ae1 1280w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/1.-jj70723-banner-detail-3.jpg?w=1520&h=1140&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676472867&s=e937c54ea32a2e7d2ee178541e1dc480 1520w)
Introductions | Emma Cousin
Introductions | Emma Cousin
2021년 1월 22일 ~ 3월 9일
Emma Cousin’s figurative paintings feature dynamic, carnivalesque scenarios that explore the space between realism and fantasy, felt experience and communication.
Responding to the limitations of language when used to articulate the complexities of human experience and emotions, Cousin considers how we might interact without it, in pre- or post-linguistic states. Taking this idea of ‘the failure of language to the ultimate point’, she imagines how the gestures of the body would now take over.
‘Introductions | Emma Cousin’ is curated by Capucine Perrot, Associate Director, Artist Liaison.
![](https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/2.-dyptich4-crop.jpg?w=720&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676472868&s=7cd439e3fe8e0460602520ef53742804 720w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/2.-dyptich4-crop.jpg?w=960&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676472868&s=20d3b2c52876e7fdf6e16745cd742c92 960w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/2.-dyptich4-crop.jpg?w=1280&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676472868&s=ef4db40eb422b9e64923ebf4b01f50ad 1280w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/2.-dyptich4-crop.jpg?w=1600&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676472868&s=d788745fe9ef8d9b54d7e3dbb50245e5 1600w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/2.-dyptich4-crop.jpg?w=2295&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676472868&s=e2ff8b1116006df14d8d98e17052c83f 2295w)
In Cousin's work, narratives are ambiguous, often double-edged, suggesting multiple potential interpretations of their mises-en-scène. Fluid and entropic, the human forms appear both erotic and sinister, merging and mutating in a sequence of primal interactions. Vividly coloured limbs stretch, contort and conjoin in endless permutations and the body, automaton-like, is transfigured into an assemblage of fleshy tools.
These layered compositions, with their interweaving human forms, imply a breakdown of social structure, suggesting a more animalistic order. Tension is built by what Cousin has termed the ‘proximity to obscenity’, through figures that are at once cartoonish and menacing.
Emma Cousin
Velcrow, 2020
Fowl Mouth (2020) and Velcrow (2020) use offensive hand gestures, reworking these familiar signs to investigate the real power behind their meaning. In Velcrow, hands make an ‘L’ shape – signifying both ‘loser’ and, when pointed forward, a gun. Here, however, the signs are rendered mute since they encounter bodies in their path, now becoming futile jabs into skin rather than clear modes of non-verbal communications.
‘I started making gestures, making shapes with my hands and face and fingers. Then I started to fill them in – these openings or gaps or holes presented a way to complete a circuit.’
- Emma Cousin
Emma Cousin
Fowl Mouth, 2020
![](https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/3.-jj70721-d4.jpg?w=720&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676472870&s=64e1c22aa542e8fbd56f847e33338021 720w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/3.-jj70721-d4.jpg?w=960&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676472870&s=65394deadfe0c7ec16b00f42f2b38d99 960w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/3.-jj70721-d4.jpg?w=1280&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676472870&s=ce440d70c2b451b40fb0288d7c13a61d 1280w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/3.-jj70721-d4.jpg?w=1600&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676472870&s=92d3c8a35ea33ec42036c4dd4b0e11d0 1600w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/3.-jj70721-d4.jpg?w=2360&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676472870&s=ff02ee396525cf78deb8a8157fefc694 2360w)
Emma Cousin
Base Camp, 2020
In Base Camp (2020), a group of partial figures are tightly packed against a dark background, their bodies emitting a glowing light, an effect rendered by allowing the painting’s raw primer to shine through. At the same time the perspective is skewed so that the ground is turned upright, as if we are inside a tent, peering down and into this confined space.
Emma Cousin
In boca lupo, 2019
![](https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/4.-jj70722-banner-detail.jpg?w=720&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676472872&s=20143185fbb2f9fec53571574a421d49 720w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/4.-jj70722-banner-detail.jpg?w=960&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676472872&s=a415fc2a95b9f6ac48fbb7fa18e43d55 960w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/4.-jj70722-banner-detail.jpg?w=1280&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676472872&s=3f96bc0e01e4ec818188d835fcd2733d 1280w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/4.-jj70722-banner-detail.jpg?w=1591&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676472872&s=70be1832cf45143be027432321dc78af 1591w)
Beginning with drawing, usually directly onto the canvas surface, Cousin’s works retain a strong, graphic quality, with the figures sharply delineated to anchor their place within the composition. Infilled with a palette of bold, pungent colours, the paintings have an insistently hallucinatory presence. Flesh takes expressly unnatural, incandescent tones — from rosy pink, to jaundiced yellow, with areas of deep purple or puce green invoking a sense of near noxious decay.
Emma Cousin
Rhubarb Rhubarb Rhubarb, 2021
‘There’s something glow-in-the-dark about the flesh colours, maybe from an underground light source, but maybe a little nuclear too.’
– Emma Cousin
Knock Knock (2020) refers to the common joke format beginning ‘Knock knock, who’s there?’, which involves an audience response to deliver its punchline. In this work, a mêlée of limbs, heads and hands, in lurid orange and yellow tones appear to double, like a Rorschach image emerging from the central axis of the painting. Oversized hands signal towards the viewer; meaningless and ineffectual signs they seem to be pushing against the edges of the canvas, threatening to intrude our space.
Emma Cousin
Knock Knock, 2020
Emma Cousin
Crocket Crotchet, 2020
‘There is a sense of claustrophobia from bodies wedged in against the edges of the canvas, like the characters are fiddling with the frame.’
Gestures, in Cousin’s paintings, always have a dialectic potential: caressing becomes violent prodding, holding switches to pushing, so that affection and aggression are malleable conditions. The figures in Vaseline (2019), for example, seem curious yet remote, their actions intimate yet mechanical.
Emma Cousin
Vaseline, 2019
Emma Cousin
Stone cold stunner, 2020
A theatrical sense of alienation is heightened by the use of single-coloured, graded backgrounds, rendered in shades of blue, grey or black to elongate shadows and provide a luminous backlight. These add to the notion of an apparition, of ungrounded figures without any specific details identifying time or place. Renaissance painting, the 18th century still lifes of Luis Egidio Meléndez, and the ‘body conscious’ paintings of Maria Lassnig, are among the many reference points for these new works.
Emma Cousin
Pizzicato, 2020
‘All of the backgrounds in these paintings are graduated to suggest depth – the figures are not trying to get out of the painting, they’re trying to get further in.’
Emma Cousin
Spork, 2020
Emma Cousin
Trigonometry, 2020
![Photographic portrait of Emma Cousin sitting in a chair](https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/5.-emma-cousin-portrait_faris-mustafa_1.jpg?w=720&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676471005&s=c805a6ac6790b4d40185100206184783 720w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/5.-emma-cousin-portrait_faris-mustafa_1.jpg?w=960&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676471005&s=70d57ad441e3b420d51f7491c1d4610b 960w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/5.-emma-cousin-portrait_faris-mustafa_1.jpg?w=1280&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676471005&s=3b03dfda30f1765dbaf1321a9ece8aa6 1280w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/5.-emma-cousin-portrait_faris-mustafa_1.jpg?w=1600&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676471005&s=8b3143c0cb07e3a3bb6850d653255741 1600w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Online-Exhibitions/Introductions/Emma-Cousin/5.-emma-cousin-portrait_faris-mustafa_1.jpg?w=2360&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1676471005&s=84ed5140f4689ce3ddc3a24e93dda773 2360w)
Emma Cousin
Emma Cousin was born in Yorkshire, UK, in 1986 and is currently based in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Goldsmiths CCA, London (2020); Milton Keynes Art Centre, UK (2019); Lewisham Arthouse, London (2018); and Dolph Projects, London (2017). Recent group exhibitions include ‘Soft Bodies’, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, UK (2020); Jerwood Arts exhibition ‘Survey’ at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK, The Bluecoat, Liverpool, UK and G39, Cardiff, UK (2019); ‘Ridiculous’, Elephant West, London (2020); and ‘Ultra’, J Hammond Projects, London (2019).
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