On Naudline Pierre: Rendering an Ephemeral Self

A spiritual education may be composed of physical gatherings in a church, or visits to jewelry stores, history lessons about woodblock prints, trips to blueberry farms, vintage markets, the sea. After a series of tentative repetitions, a dialogue emerges between the soul of a young person and the dogma of wherever they go to pay worship, based upon the interplay of pleasure and pain. This relationship opens up something inside of them that, while with age and perspective the nature of their faith may evolve, won’t ever alter the intensity of its feeling. I was reminded both of the material as well as the ephemeral pull that such a relationship with art can evoke when looking at Naudline Pierre’s gorgeous, sensual, evocative, and ferocious paintings. Perhaps because her work often depicts figures in flight through fantastical worlds, but also because she makes paintings featuring a protagonist that all seemingly exist in conversation with each other, clearly reaching for transcendence within a world in collapse.

The History of Autofiction

Around the time of the Occupy Wall Street Movement when the spirit of rebellion was in the air, the movement to write works that are now categorized under the genre of autofiction, emerged. Whether the link was conscious or not I’m not sure, as I was still in middle school and not tapped into the literary scene at that time. But around that moment, people started writing stories that explicitly pointed to the presence of themselves as the writer and protagonist within the scope of their own narratives. 

In the publishing market, these works were sometimes classified as fiction, others as nonfiction. Whichever seemed like a closer fit, though it was clear from reviews that autofiction was considered a less-regarded sibling, a bastardazation, of both. Writers, from what I’ve gathered, often declined to categorize their works altogether, given that there was a conscious effort on the part of the publishing industry to minimize their books due to the lack of a clear genre category. Forced to defend their work in the gaping crevice in the ground where they were stuck as prisoners of the writing that they were creating in order to liberate themselves from their lives because, let’s face it, most stories that are in some ways explicitly autobiographical in nature (even sometimes implicitly), are written by marginalized people as a testimony of their experiences. As evidence of the world they came from, a reality that wasn’t reflected in the fiction they found in their local library. Often, such works chronicle the effort of its writer to wrestle with their own demons. In other words, the act of writing became a process of freeing someone from the constraints of the prison they existed in, before. 

That before is crucial. To narrate an act of liberation, first there must be the establishment of the context from which freedom was actively sought. Whether it’s an emotionally or physically abusive household, a warzone, a forced exile, a homophobic small town, rendering it as it was inhabited on the part of the marginalized person becomes both an intellectual and emotional exercise. Theory alone is insufficient, but diary entries aren’t, in of themselves, either. We can find this in the books written by feminist writers like Maya Angelou, Alba de Céspedes, Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, and Audre Lorde, where they all reckon with the role gender played in their social conditioning. We too can see this in the writings of survivors of concentration camps in World War II, from Charlotte Delbo to Primo Levi. We can also see this in the work of Mahmoud Darwish, the famed Palestinian poet who was exiled for most of his life and blended myth, poetry, and personal narrative into a conflagration. Rarely, if ever, is there a capacity on the part of people who are deeply affected by forces of marginalization, to entirely escape the pressure of the world that sought to diminish them. 

Autofiction need not exist as an artistic categorization solely for writers. Photographers, filmmakers, poets, sculptors, anyone can make work that blurs the space between the subject and creator of a work. Autofiction, as we call it now, can be a corridor in which artists negotiate the force within themselves to express the strength of their own point of view, up against the weight of those who tried to suppress their voice.

Naudline Pierre’s World

Naudline Pierre was born in Massachusetts in 1989 as the child of Haitian immigrants. She frequently attended church during her childhood, as her father was a minister. Clearly influenced by notions of the divine, her works of art construct a personal mythology that contrasts with narratives of devotion evoked by Renaissance paintings, even occasionally saints or figures from the Middle Ages that were often depicted on altar pieces. Yet, unlike their focus on realism, hers are often painted with ambiguity—the worldbuilding in her bright, dynamic paintings draws the eye more than the specificity of the features of the body or bodies inhabiting it. Most distinctively, the subjects at the center of her paintings are, she’s confessed, aspects of her, almost like alter-egos. Figures that while they may not be exact renderings, are meant to situate her existence as a Black woman reckoning with the history of oil painting as an analogy to her experience as someone who was raised in a Christian-Protestant upbringing grappling with its impact on her perspective on the world.

As she discloses in her interview with BOMB Magazine: 

The world I’m creating through these paintings isn’t one where a linear narrative makes sense. I’m interested in accessing moments from a place where time doesn’t work the way it does in my own reality. I’m constantly aware of the fact that there’s always more than the eye can see. There’s more to the scenes being revealed to me, outside the borders of the painting, and that’s inspiring to me. I’m inspired by the religious iconography of Renaissance painting and sculpture, and by colors that make you feel, personal experiences, and emotions. I’m especially inspired by moments that transcend the everyday. I’m looking for transcendence, always.

She acknowledges in other interviews that her childhood sense that the end times were imminent, is a sensation that’s never really left her. Transcendence, as she noted above, was the ultimate liberation from the prison of the everyday. According to her interview with Cultured Mag, during her childhood she “absorbed lots of visuals of beasts and fire, but also many references to otherworldly beings and a future new world.” As a result, her paintings are in dialogue with her spiritual inheritance, but place her body within it as a subject fighting against its weight.

Establishing Definitions in Art Movements

When an art movement is emerging, it doesn’t label itself as such. Definitions come after a collection of artists come together to experiment, with tools, on their own terms. Names come later, once attention is paid to the activity of a group and history decides it’s a significant enough contribution to culture. 

In the mid-2010s, critics explicitly labeled this new genre “autofiction” and noticed that there was a common pattern amongst its authors. They were often folks who had experienced marginalization in some way, who were articulating something in their life that they felt was as important as the plots of Middlemarch or In Search of Lost Time, as critical as the Civil War documentaries by Ken Burns—and also questioned it, within the context of their work. The initial conscious neglect of the value of these books on the part of critics, soon evolved into reviews and essays that explicitly tried to minimize the relevance of autofiction. Once critics and magazines reached a point in which they agreed to state: autofiction exists, this is an artistic movement—the power of it as an underground literary movement slightly dissolved by virtue of it being named and labeled, as such. 

Identifying something, placing a definition on it can quickly become another form of marginalization, because definitions impose constraints. Even if ideally, they clarify meaning and perspective in order to open up alternative possibilities for existing within and without the framework that the definition provides—they nevertheless include some ideas, exclude others. 

We’re in a cultural and artistic moment in which we are seemingly asked to only speak for things we know or provide stories of total escape from our everyday lives—to eliminate the nuance between transcendence and the everyday. Whether a result of corporate consolidation or shifts in taste, we seem to be in a conservative moment that wishes to identify fiction as existing purely in the lane of fiction, nonfiction as existing in the space of nonfiction, and that there is very little blurring in-between; and that intellect comes not in the form of a rigorous result of critical thinking, but actually in the capacity to effectively inhabit those binary domains. 

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with testimonies of personal experience or works of fiction that conjure purely alternative worlds, but I do feel as if it’s clear that most works of art are somewhat inspired by their creator’s life experiences, and somewhat inspired by fantasy. A renewed movement of publishers, gallerists, and music executives, to reject autofiction that accentuates the impossibility of that binary, is unfortunately once again becoming more and more common. It’s hard to know if audiences are also less interested in works that treat reality and fiction as a spectrum, but there seem to be fewer new works at the moment that break apart the notion of the suspension of disbelief. Works that are textured, dynamic, inconclusive, polyphonic, polychromatic. Works that question the assumption that art is different than life, but also not entirely different, either. Skewed works that recognize that we don’t all live in the same world, with the same opportunities, and the same support systems, and therefore are conscious that no one is transported by art in the same way. 

Identity and Alter Egos

The notion of having an alter ego of yourself within a work is ubiquitous across all of art history. Probably in the ballpark of, at least a third of all paintings, function as a self-portrait of its artist—regardless of whether or not it’s a figurative portrait. An evocation of their spirit is omnipresent, evident in the color scheme, or the way in which the lighting moves over the skin of the subject; the clothing choices, the setting, the references. Any and all of it may be self-referential. Pierre’s work is explicitly an interrogation, exploration, an inhabitation of this contradiction. She embodies its fissure, irreverently. She renders how a body can move in space and time, a body that looks like her but isn’t quite—in the present, past, and even, potentially, future. 

“Although I use the word alter ego and she sometimes resembles me,” she also mentioned in her BOMB interview, “I consider her to have an independent existence and thus she is not a self-portrait. I’ve recently begun explaining my relationship to her as twins who live in different dimensions. We’re connected but also separate.”

In other words, her paintings can be thought of as portals that acknowledge the seams of their own construction. Rather than art as a form of escapism, they challenge a viewer to gaze at the particularities of a character in a moment of time—while also questioning their own.

A spiritual education may be composed of physical gatherings in a church, or visits to jewelry stores, history lessons about woodblock prints, trips to blueberry farms, vintage markets, the sea. After a series of tentative repetitions, a dialogue emerges between each of us and the dogma of wherever we go to pay worship, based upon the interplay of pleasure and pain. This relationship opens up something inside of us that, while with age and perspective the nature of our faith may evolve, won’t ever alter the intensity of its feeling. 

Perhaps because Pierre’s work often depicts an iteration of herself in flight through fantastical worlds, but also because she makes paintings featuring a protagonist that all seemingly exist in conversation with each other, as viewers she invites us to consider how we may each draw on the spaces where we are transported, where we feel closest to the divine in our everyday life—while continuing to question its constraints.

Featured image: Naudline Pierre, The Flow Between, 2025 Oil on linen 60 x 72 in. 152.4 x 182.9 cm (JCG18572) © Naudline Pierre 2025. Image courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Dan Bradica.