The Galbut Institute is pleased to present Ces Petits Riens, an exhibition of intimate, small-scaled paintings by the artist Anna Vickers. In his song Ces Petits Riens, Serge Gainsbourg vocalizes a meter of riens, or nothings, into poetic song. Similarly, Vickers gives visual shape to a series of riens by transforming them into virtuosic verses of paint.

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Embodied by the female nude, these Fragonard-scaled riens lithely emerge from a state of aestivation into blue lagoons and natural ponds. Hazy-looking water and shadowy voids evoke stirred-up sediment from exited burrows. Relaxed and tadpole-like, the larval figures casually swim about in bubbling water defined by tiny fan-brushed waves painted like the leaves of Watteau’s trees.  A subtle pearlescence permeates the ponds like the subtle pearlescence of Daubigny’s skies.

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In Blues 5, a trio of figures glowing like luminous jellyfish or kryptonite alludes to The Three Graces while also evoking bacteria in a petri dish. An atmospheric texture resembling fungus shrouds the Graces like the fog in Monet’s views of the river Thames. Built up from dense layers of paint, the result is a surface as crusty as a Jean Fautrier or early Frank Auerbach painting. In Blues 9, a figure posed like the Borghese Hermaphrodite on Bernini’s sumptuous mattress appears as if pinned to a dissection tray. More rigid and static than the Roman sculpture, it hearkens to the mathematical precision of William Coldstream and Euan Uglow.

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The twelve works in the exhibition are part of Vickers’ Blues series. From spaces visually turned down in temperature to the coolness of Ingres’ boudoir in La Grande Odalisque, figures appear to have emerged from a cryogenic state.  Themes of reawakening, metamorphosis and emergence abound, but with no sense of urgency. Casually reconstituting themselves from the devolved status of a microbe, Vickers’ liminal figures glide and recline, enjoying their repose.