Press Release by Kirsten Cave

Cara Nahaul paints landscapes distilled to their essential geometry, weighted with bold, saturated colors. Continuing to paint from memory and reference photographs, Nahaul furthers her explorations of nostalgia, personal history, and physical and psychological travel. Tender Island marks Nahaul’s first exhibition with Alexander Berggruen.

In Tender Island, Nahaul hones her focus on the contradictory pluralisms between her fond childhood memories visiting Mauritius while reflecting on, in her words, “the more unsettling and painful narratives that puncture those childhood memories, to consider how we can broaden our understanding of colonial legacies and the impact it had on generations long after.” These include her discomfort with the island’s reputation as a tropical tourist destination that overlooks the darker parts of its history, and speculation about her great, great grandfather’s experiences as an indentured laborer on Mauritian sugarcane plantations. Subtly implicating the history of the land, a Dantean journey unravels.

Nahaul celebrates the flowing flora and fauna of the island with vivid hues that are bled into the canvas. The edges of some of her forms are emphasized with bright reds, blues, and greens akin to Wayne Thiebaud’s treatment of the myriad of colors present in the thresholds of shadows and highlights. After beginning with black and white charcoal sketches, she introduces color sequentially as she paints, generating, in her words, “friction” against what has already been placed on the canvas. She stated: “I never want the color to be comfortable.” This approach imbues her paintings with the intensity of island weather and generational trauma. Her new body of work is emboldened by inspiration from the writer Gaiutra Bahadur’s book Coolie Woman as they both grapple with the traumas embedded in their heritages through weaving speculative fiction with non-fiction.

Tension builds as the artist confronts the houses on sugarcane plantations and the establishment of luxury hotels, painting these buildings straight on. Her painting Beyond the cane places a viewer behind a pink bush, looking over a sugarcane field in front of a white two-story plantation home. Portraying these houses only from a distance within the fields—the same view some indentured laborers would have seen—Nahaul documents the historical remnants.

Wild animals appear in some of the paintings in this show. In her endearingly titled The Neighbour series, she paints a turtle that has crawled out of grasses and is peering around corners of buildings. In other works, a peacock and a rooster also enter the scenes, taking center stage. They stand tall and still, becoming as much a part of the landscape as a tree, the sky, or the ocean. These creatures are woven into the fabric of the land as an essential part of its ecosystem and as witnesses to the local history.

Reminiscent of Lois Dodd or Alex Katz, Nahaul’s simplified forms generate spatial ambiguity as they oscillate between illusionistic depth and the flat surface. She captures a unique sense of place with detachment and distance, similar to the feeling of Hurvin Anderson’s meditative close study paintings. Her ambiguous approach to space mimics the ways the island’s histories are hidden by its natural beauty and commercial development. By sharing only the essentials, Nahaul also resists exploitation.

The exhibition’s title Tender Island underscores the pluralisms driving the artist’s interest in painting her memories of Mauritius. “Tender” here refers to her affection for the land. Concurrently, “tender” refers to the role of one who cultivates and mines resources from the land. With respect to an awareness that the presence of her ancestors looms large among her landscape paintings of Mauritius, this exhibition includes a single portrait Auladin: it features her great, great grandfather who was an indentured laborer there when he immigrated from India. As his immigration documents stated he was employed as a “gardener,” it is understood that he worked on sugarcane plantations, as most migrant laborers did under British colonial rule.

Central to the exhibition, her painting Sunset foam is an optical illusion—the juxtaposition of a pink tree against a yellow sky tricks the eye into seeing the sky as on fire. Setting a blaze to the notion of an idyllic beach sunset, Nahaul brings the trauma of the island’s past to the fore. In Tender Island, Cara Nahaul induces multistable perception, presenting both the beauty of island life and the depths of the land’s dark history.