Indian
Summer

In Indian Summer, Pandora Decoster gives the California coast the pace of an afternoon spent there. A board carried towards the water, friends gathered on the sand, a road winding through pink hills: ordinary gestures and familiar places establish a rhythm of movement and pause.

Her simplified lines and broad areas of colour give these scenes a gently displaced quality. Pink shifts the hills away from literal description, allowing an observed landscape to take on something of a remembered place. Colour becomes a way of holding the atmosphere of a day while loosening its attachment to geography.

Decoster’s experience as a surfer grounds this coastal imagery in a physical relationship with the ocean. Around the water unfolds a daily life of walking, waiting, gathering and resting. These moments give the paintings their intimacy, bringing the landscape within reach of the body and the encounters that take place there.

The title Indian Summer suggests warmth persisting as the season turns. It introduces an awareness of passing time into scenes that seem in no hurry to end. An afternoon stretches out; for a moment, there is still time to stay.