I exited Mother’s Tankstation Dublin with a firm handshake and declaration to artist David Godbold: “Here’s to small gigs!” It had been an hour of generous discussion that led to this…. “small gigs”! I walked away thinking that I’d just experienced a small gig, one that I would return to time and again to sublimate the next big gig. It went something like this… The painter looks down upon BERNICE, MONTECITO HEIGHTS. We know this is the name of the place because it’s plainly and purposefully written on the bottom left-hand corner of a painting by JESSIE HOMER FRENCH found written on the opposite corner. ALL in CAPS—these are not signatures! These are gravestones, planted on the walls of the gallery; and on the floor, oversized cut-out dogs inact lean-tos to another unique cultural lean-to on the Dublin quays, Mother’s Tankstation. Jessie Homer French’s paintings are testaments to a shouldering of Time, and a life lived and loved through painting. We can almost feel the breath of the painter on our cheek as we look down at lives being monitored with a brush that toys with the toy world that comes and goes and goes. The past is behind us but, here, face forward, cheek to cheek with the painter, it plays out before our eyes. These comings and goings are emphasised by boomerang highways drenched in tenebrist pools of alien twilight. Light burns into light to leave nature cowering under the glow of a dinky civilization as it gives one last push into the night. Left and right, place and name—‘place-name’ if they met in the centre—make you rethink the nature of the painter’s signature written in the corners of every café painting as not just convention but as an indelible reclaiming of the object the artist orphaned into the world to be possessed by other people. My personal references to this view of L.A. are not, self-surprisingly, from TV, but from literature. Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road similarly haunt similar hills in lonely and yearning arias amidst window-sill-cooling American pies and tear-gas clouds that wrench the ghostly social and romantic past into the disembodied present in rolling-with-hope verse towards the ever-nothing. Words have been composed, dreamt-up, experienced here—Ed Ruscha resides in GIANT LETTERS in the sky. It seems painting (undercover) has wandered these hills too, for yonks, all the way back to Pynchon (b. 1937) if not Kerouac (b. 1922). But Who Knows? Jessie Homer French (b. 1940) has just emerged from the Who Knows? of these hills onto another platform, one that has the highs and lows of a Super Mario game (b. 1981)—the international artworld proper. And these paintings look a little 8-bit, with their ping and pong formalism. Kids would get them because they are kids; adults might get them because they were once kids. They are the paintings we wanted to paint before we went to art school. They are made-up, and made-down—folding berths for the eyes to sleep and dream. They shine with a forcefield of lacquer as if the painter needed to protect them from the outside world, to seal them in, to stop them in their tracks, like gravestones that mark time, mark death, mark a life. Where there is life there is death there is life—we move on. The artist is feeling something with paint rather than speaking the languages of paint for its own sake. The technique is not exactly naive, but it’s not knowing either. It has purpose towards a certain storytelling. The flat patterning of perspectives of fauna and flora of this little bitty elemental world—flowers, fish, dogs, cars, forest fires, people—range across the paintings and walls of the gallery as if about to fall into our lap (not floor). A guy in a river hatchery vibrating with colour walks tightrope between two manmade ponds dancing with fish. Beyond, stick trees like stick people vie with the silhouettes of mountains in the distance; up close those same sticks and silhouettes weave together in paint like reeds caught in a flood. We are drenched. Perversely, but effectively, placed beside this hatchery humming with life (and adjacent a gallery door signed PRIVATE) we are brought down to earth to take perspective and wrestle with priorities in a graveyard where the mourning of a child, aged 4—the artist’s own daughter, plays out in a green field of 8-bit simplicity and childhood directness. This is not a game. A tree, spikey like a palm, like the one that Roland Barthes introduces his autobiography with, stands solitary and big and dark and One above an occupied bed of flowers, flowers that are given the most attention in paint. Life tucks in death. But it is those that have come here to mourn—black and white scarecrows willing away the black, not in a scrum under Hollywood rain and umbrellas, but set back at a peculiar distance, as if peeling away from the scene—that gets into your bones. Once again we are looking from the hills of L.A. and genuflecting to a life that we can only experience from afar. As humans we dream of the big gigs whilst living and reliving the small gigs. Strangely, when the big gigs arrive in our lives we end up reliving the small gigs. It makes you think that desire can only be lived through or reflected upon, but never appreciated in the present. Desire is HERE and NOW, we just don’t know it yet. I return to the here and now with David Godbold and the press release for this Dublin edition of this Jessie Homer French ‘survey’ (a London edition runs concurrently in Mother’s Tankstation London) and wonder, prompted by our discussion, why this exhibition has captured imaginations locally and internationally, as both make what has become the physical pilgrimage to the gallery, and not just take the easier virtual route and go online? It’s simple. Besides the intrigue that Jessie Homer French presents—if we can get past the artworld’s recruitment and resurrection of similar forgotten fairytales—in the press release Mothers’ ghost writer talks directly to us about the private comings and goings of the gallery via the post. The gallery is unlocked through the CONFIDENTIAL. As I stand (with David Godbold) in what the ghost writer describes in the press release as a “sort of hallway or cuboid anti-chamber from which one enters directly from Watling Street, positioned pretty immediately below the desk from where most of these writings magically appear…”, both of us admiring Jessie Homer French’s L.A. wind turbines stamped with three stealth bombers, and what looks like a little Camille Corot pentimonto’d by a bored kid left to her own devices in the same “anti-chamber”, I admit to David that Mothers’ (and this exhibition) has been unlocked through the worded passion for this artist that infuses the press release. Nathan Zuckerman has left the building.