If you were to read Juxtapoz.com over the last few months, you will know that I have been harping on this idea of “hazy loneliness,” and I’m really happy that Fredericks & Freiser described Danielle Roberts’ Phosphorescence and Gasoline in this light. We are in a moment of haziness in the post-pandemicc universe, where we went from intense figuration and realism to work that obsessed over domestic settings and then a return to a more “how do we coexist” style of interaction now to hazy loneliness. A sort of longing to understand memories, where we have come from, how much we have changed and what was the world and our feelings before the pandemic, and maybe more in the reality of what was our life like pre-Trump.
Roberts paints noir scenes, but through a suburbia setting. There are people at dive bars, stoney parties, driving in cars, stoned at strip malls. There is a fantasy to them, a tension, too. Roberts told us in her feature in Summer 2023 that “There is often a tension, or wonder if something is about to happen that might change everything in a positive or negative way. Or it might feel like something just happened,” and that gets to the hazy loneliness we feel is vital in painting right now. Roberts is one of the best in a collective of artists who are tackling what it is we have just come from and what are memories and how can we paint them in this hyper-technological world. —Evan Pricco
