American painter Cynthia Daignault draws particular inspiration from art history. This passion is reflected in unrelenting detail across her oeuvre. Daignault received her B.A. from Stanford University, but rather than continue on a postgraduate academic course, she instead chose to work with and be mentored by other artists, such as Kara Walker, recalling the traditions of artist apprenticeships and mentorships of times past—and creating another layer to her history-influenced work and practice.
Installation view of “Cynthia Daignault: The Lemon” (2024). Photo: Marten Elder. Courtesy of Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
On view through January 18, 2024, Night Gallery in Los Angeles is staging “The Lemon,” Daignault’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The show includes new paintings that reconsider some of art history’s most canonical works, including Édouard Manet’s Le Citron, from which the show takes its name. The show’s central work The Collection (2024) brings together a jewel box selection of such lauded paintings—from Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Manet to Georgia O’Keeffe and Jackson Pollock— into one kunstkammer-like composition. Taking the approach even further, The Book (2024) shows a spread from a publication on Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne, replete with color plate illustrations. Moving through the show, Daignault’s careful consideration and appreciation of each artist’s work is apparent, and the otherwise disparate makers and images are made cohesive, even universal, through her own artistic style.
Cynthia Daignault, detail of The Lemon (2024). Photo: Nik Massey. Courtesy of Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
“‘The Lemon’ takes its name from Le Citron, a still-life of a lemon on a dark plate, painted by Édouard Manet in 1880,” Daignault explained via press release for the show at Night Gallery. “I’ve come to feel that the act of painting is like walking in a heavy snow. At times I am by myself. The path is so quiet, cumbersome and lonely. But at other times, I find a line of footprints in the snow and walk for a while inside the indentations of someone else’s shoes. Like this, I accidentally run into other painters when I’m working. I see traces of them in a brushstroke, a color, or an idea. Or I purposefully go after them in copies and allusions, trying to commune with them. In truth, I am rarely alone. Collective consciousness exists outside of time.”
Cynthia Daignault, The Springtime (2024). Photo: Nik Massey. Courtesy of Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
Concurrent with “The Lemon,” Daignault’s work is included in the group exhibition “Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, which features the artist’s monumental Twenty-Six Seconds (2021). Comprised of 486 individual panels, the work revisits what is referred to as the “Zaprunder film,” a silent, 8mm video shot by Abraham Zapruder on a home-movie camera capturing the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. Through meticulous studies, Daignault transforms the film into concrete moments, offering expanded insight into the role visual media plays in creating a cultural fabric that transcends genre and permeates collective consciousness.
“Cynthia Daignault: The Lemon” is on view at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, through January 18, 2024.