ADZ is pleased to present Sur les Deux Joues, Tendrement / On Both Cheeks, Tenderly, the first solo exhibition of Esme Hodsoll at the gallery. Opening Friday 03, April, from 7-10pm.

Born in London and based in Paris, Hodsoll works in oils at a deliberate pace - observing the same objects over months, sometimes years. Several works in this exhibition trace their origins back to 2021, their surfaces quietly accumulating light, atmosphere, and time.

The exhibition title is drawn from the correspondence of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert. Despite their many differences, both writers closed their letters with quiet tenderness. It is a tone Hodsoll's work shares — patient, attentive, and warm.

(Paris, December 7, 1866)

George Sand to Flaubert Nor put anything of your heart into what you write? I don't understand at all, oh, but nor at all. To me it seems that you can't put anything else into it. Can you separate your mind from your heart? Is it something different? Can feeling limit itself? Can one's being split itself in two? In short, not to give of yourself entirely in your work seems to me as impossible as to weep with something other than your eyes or to think with something other than your brain. What was it you meant? Answer when you have time.

(Croisset,) Saturday Night (December 15–16, 1866)

Flaubert to George Sand I expressed myself badly when I told you "one must not write with one's heart." What I meant was: don't put your own personality on stage. I believe that great art is scientific and impersonal. What is necessary is by an intellectual effort, to transport yourself into your characters — not attract them to yourself. Such at least is the method — which amounts to this: try to have a lot of talent, and even genius, if you can. What vanity, all poetics, all works of criticism! The complacency of the gentlemen who produce such things flabbergasts me! Oh! Nothing daunts those numbskulls!

Flaubert, "To George Sand," December 15–16, 1866, in The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, ed. and trans. Francis Steegmuller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 458.