What is the nature of expression? Is it immediate and fleeting, a swift emanation of something internal and felt? Or is it the filling in of a gap between the substance of physical reality and its planar appearance? These questions sit at the fore of Nicole Wittenberg’s painting practice, which takes scenes, elements, and encounters with the natural world as its subject matter, most earnestly illustrated here as a collection of painted works on canvas in Maison La Roche.

Le Corbusier’s architecture famously blurs the line between interior and exterior spaces, giving prominence to natural light so as to establish an elegant drift between built structures and their surrounding environments. Le Corbusier’s designs are distinguished by a poetics of space, a certain graceful geometry that emphasises expressiveness, and a shifting of perspective to bring the outside in, and vice versa.

Wittenberg’s artistic sensibility embraces this affinity for the natural world and the importance of light. Yet, her paintings push against Le Corbusier’s language of cleanliness and purity—“a house is a machine for living in,” remains one of his most notorious lines—offering sensations less clarified and transcendent. Instead, her works evoke an expressionism that is suffused with emotion and raw experience, with dynamic movement that is both rough and spirited. Her use of bold tones evokes Goethe’s Theory of Colours (1810), an early elucidation of the psychological impact of colours that suggests the eye is not only a sensory organ, but a creative one. These facets of her work, animated as they are, set into motion an all the more fruitful exchange with Le Corbusier’s tranquil space.

“Ain’t Misbehavin’” presents a series of Wittenberg’s paintings that are developed from her preparatory plein air sketches in pastel. They relate the pleasures of the garden in bloom, but also the urge to record these temporal moments as impressions, since the works represent a phase of development that sits between the immediacy of painting in situ and the memory-work of refining the paintings in her studio. The process also speaks to a correlation between transience and profound presence. While not produced “in the field”, the works are painted with dynamic movement that delineates a psychic, affective space, and one that retains the energy of encounter. She aims to transmit elusive feelings, fleeting and transient moments, a universally common but impossible to describe sense of egoless connection to the natural world, and a sense of empathy for other forms of life.

The works are vivid. Botanic figures torque, twist, and spin within picture plane, pushing against edges of canvas. In these works, especially, Wittenberg relates the painted surface to the surfaces of local elements—leaves, stems, petals, bark—establishing a visual polyrhythm that speaks to her often-cited love for jazz music. Reminiscent of jazz, the works are syncopated; they express a deviating cadence. Jazz, a genre that is not easily defined, is constantly evolving, and that fleeting, temporal, changeable essence is imbued into Wittenberg’s work. Like jazz, Wittenberg’s canvases are not composed or predetermined, nor are they entirely improvised or impulsive: she follows a musical logic that allows for a degree of expressive freedom, and one that accentuates touch and feel. Like the movement of a voice around a song—Billie Holiday’s, for example, whose voice travels the melody of her 1958 recording of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” with impeccable style—Wittenberg’s approach to painting invites different ways of seeing that exceed or are alternative to empirical modes of observing—and being with—phenomena in nature.