TEXT BY MICHAELA MULLIN | VIEW IMAGES
Adele Renault has created a fantastical and natural exhibit of large-scale oil on canvas paintings of banana leaves and other plant life from her larger series, Plantasia. Stalks and blades, light and shade–Renault’s leaves both warm and cool us, and her complete coverage of canvases supports the sumptuous fullness of her subjects.
Renault says, “I literally ‘go bananas’ when I see a red banana leaf, or even just the plain green ones.” On a previous trip to Des Moines, she spent and afternoon in the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden, mesmerized by a red banana plant. During this time, she realized that “the repetitiveness of the lines found in banana leaves seemed like a new playground following the feathers of [her] Gutter Paradise series,” where her only subjects were birds.
The painting “Bananas” is a short image essay, including varied lush moments, from left to right, as someone in the West would read it. It serves as a foreword of this show, letting us look straight on into the midst of these plants, and scan. From the leaves making shade for each other to the bended ones that open gaps for the sunlight, holding it as two open hands on the canvas.
“Des Moines Stacking the Chips,” was inspired by the Joni Mitchell song, “The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines.” This song, a favorite of Renault’s, was her only reference to the capital city of Iowa until she stepped foot in the city a few years ago to paint a mural. The Mitchell song is about a Des Moines man in Vegas, on a winning streak:
Des Moines was stacking the chips
Raking off the tables
Ringing the bandit’s bells
This is a story that’s a drag to tell
(In some ways)
Since I lost every dime
I laid on the line
It turns out, green is a lucky color for Renault’s viewers, as well. The way she handles and lays down her lines creates incredible nuances of the turning of a leaf, the venation upon the surface, or the soft parting of parts.
There are soft purples and a more impressionistic mood within and behind the leaves in the painting “Tie Dye Socks.” And in “Folds,” Renault zeroes in on the yellow glow of light along and beneath a leaf, dog eared with something important to reference within its veins. “Leaves of a Strange Berry” is a less-dense painting, offering patches of pure light, white gaps between the contours of leaves and stems. Renault paints the color of photosynthesis taking place; she renders protuberance and emergence, the height and heft of a sturdy shrub, where bananas—botanically classified as berries—grow in familiar clusters. These paintings bring the verdant world to us and show us the browning edges of living things, the green of what feeds us and gives us breath, and without which, would take our breath away.
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