Exhibition Preview: Wednesday, April 16th, from 6-7:30pm in Palm Beach.

Acquavella Palm Beach is pleased to present All the Wild That Remains, Joani Tremblay’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and her first in Palm Beach. The exhibition features several new paintings that span two signature bodies of work including large-scale landscapes and intimate flower paintings. Working between her studios in Montreal, Canada and the Mojave Desert in California, Tremblay continues her exploration of our personal and collective relationship with the natural world. All the Wild That Remains will be on view from April 17 through June 15, 2025 at Acquavella Galleries’ Palm Beach location.

Tremblay’s work explores both the physical experience of nature and our perception of it, which is often mediated through its ubiquitous representation in media, informing what the artist describes as “painting from a constructed idea of place.” Eschewing traditional approaches to landscape painting, Tremblay begins each work by assembling source materials and images culled from online sources, as well as through field observation, texts, and memory, to create digital collages that evolve through many iterations. These amalgamated landscapes coalesce into compositions that she then translates into painting. Slowly developing each canvas and surface through layered brushwork, Tremblay sees the act of painting as an opportunity to imbue the work with an atmosphere of its own, one that seems both familiar and entirely otherworldly. By integrating various media, Tremblay constructs surreal utopias that prompt viewers to reflect on multifaceted perceptions of place.

The artist is also inspired by literature, and many of the landscapes in this exhibition take their cue from books about nature and land conservation. One starting point for Tremblay was Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a 1974 book that offers a series of personal reflections on the changing seasons and wildlife of the Blue Ridge Mountains near the author's home in Virginia. In the painting Northing (2025) Tremblay refers directly to a chapter in Tinker Creek, which defines “northing” as a desire to move geographically upwards towards the spareness of winter, embodying something purer. In the painting, Tremblay creates a serene view of a nighttime sky over vast hills that are covered in a rolling fog. Rendered in a palette of deep blues and indigos, the landscape is quietly illuminated by a heavy moon above. The composition is framed by a thin violet band that draws the viewer’s attention to the enveloping landscape within.

Tremblay’s work is also deeply influenced by her own personal experiences with landscapes, citing as inspiration “the light and the sublime skies and their vastness.” In The Land of Little Rain (2024), a portal of oscillating orange and purple opens onto a landscape of vast green hills with clouds bathed in brilliant oranges and yellows rising in the sky beyond. Both beautiful and potentially ominous, their presence illustrates the energy and volatility of the natural world. Here also, the painting’s title comes from literature–a collection of writing by the early twentieth century author Mary Hunter Austin. In her book by the same name, the author meditates on the extremely hostile conditions and equally stunning beauty of the lands found across the Mojave, a source of inspiration for Tremblay, who keeps a studio in the same landscape. Like Agnes Pelton or Arthur Dove before her, Tremblay’s practice calls back to the artistic lineages of those who were similarly inspired by the wild vastness of the American Southwest.