Soleé Darrell’s Velvet Paintings Evoke Loss and Longing

Grief, distance, and connection: These themes flow through the abstract paintings in Soleé Darrell’s latest solo exhibition, “Where You Need To Be: Teleportation Studies,” on view at pt.2 gallery in Oakland, California through July 13th. Guided by her intuition, the Bermuda-born and Bay Area–based artist comes into her own with this new body of work, where a cosmic array of colors dance with awakened confidence.

When I first met Darrell in 2018, I encountered her as a jewelry artist at her booth at Renegade Craft Fair in San Francisco. More than five years later, the bright gemstones that she once set into rings have been alchemized into gem-colored pigment applied to velvet, and the geometric symmetry of her sterling silver necklaces has expanded to inform the composition of her large-scale paintings. Ideas about spirituality that she previously explored in metal are now reintroduced in a new medium.

These latest works possess a new assurance in herself and her intuition that has drawn the attention of her art community in the Bay Area and abroad. “Where You Need To Be” arrives on the heels of solo exhibitions at San Francisco’s Legion Projects and Tokyo’s Almost Perfect Residency. She is also participating in the 2024 Bermuda Biennial, “Places, Presence & Poetics,” juried by artist Ebony G. Patterson and curator Helen Toomer, which is on view at the Bermuda National Gallery through January 2025. Additionally, Darrell was recently announced as a 2024 participant in the annual Emerging Artists Program at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, where she will have her first museum exhibition this December.

The works at pt.2 in particular emerged from the self-taught artist’s wish to teleport from her home in California to her mom in Bermuda and her best friend in Brooklyn, both of whom were diagnosed with breast cancer last year. “It can be painful to feel like you should be somewhere else. Whenever I’m painting, it’s the only time I feel like I’m able to transport myself out of my situation and be in a different world,” Darrell shared in a recent interview with Artsy. “This is me coming to terms with what it means to be present where I am.”

Though Darrell has often experimented with different materials, incorporating beeswax, gold leaf, beads, wool, and other media into her practice, her vibrant color palette has generally remained constant. “Where You Need To Be,” however, diverges from her familiar visual language in its incorporation of deep maroon and dark indigo, so rich they almost appear black, as evident in The deep cavern and Between heaven and us is an opening (all work 2024). “I was channeling my grief into my work and I really was worried that it was going to be super dark and different than what I’m normally doing, which is usually very bright,” confessed Darrell. “It’s funny because The deep cavern and Between heaven and us is an opening were ones that I made at the beginning of my journey.” In both works, thick midnight hues surround a center point in which swathes of electric blue and amethyst tones commingle. It’s unclear whether the darkness is expanding to subsume this bright spot, or receding to give way to it.

Contributing to the sense of motion in Darrell’s gestural vignettes is the artist’s decision to paint on the textured surface of silk velvet, an idea that came to her in a dream in 2021. For her large-scale velvet works, she paints en plein air, using her fingers and paintbrushes dipped with water. Sometimes, she sprinkles pigment paint directly onto the surface. The result is a kaleidoscope of free-flowing colors that pulse, fade, and bleed into one another, evoking a sense of ephemerality and intangibility. Darrell’s recent compositions, with their soft organic forms, are a stark departure from her early acrylic-on-canvas paintings that feel constrained in comparison, due to their defined edges.