Martine Johanna’s ghosts are overwhelmingly female hauntings, emphasized and lamented in the artist’s solo exhibition A Particular Ghost at Hashimoto Contemporary.

The figures in Johanna’s paintings and drawings embody restless, ghostly fragments, illustrating how women's pleasure is entwined with the symbolic death of societal acceptance. Using rich greens and pinks or electric blues and yellows, the Dutch artist depicts these women confronting the viewer in ecstasy or turning inward to grieve the lack of mental freedom in the moments after. Throughout this entrancing series of works, the artist weaves a compelling narrative linking social ostracization to orgasmic pleasure and safety, expanding the idiom “small death.”

Each new painting peeks into Johanna’s private world, where she grapples with women’s hypervisibility and invisibility. Though it’s difficult not to stare at the women in explicitly sexual positions, the figures don’t return the same fascinated gaze, looking through the viewer as though our presence is inconsequential. The artist also captures quiet moments with visible tension through imagined scenes like disembodied ghosts. Depicted as floating architecture enveloped by ethereal fog or precious gems hovering inside an aurora, the synthesis of women’s bodies and haunted landscapes evoke the many ways women are made invisible: silence, omission, and force.

Bearing titles like A Round Object Has No Sharp Edge and A Ritual for a Small Death, the works in this exhibition aptly display society's double bind of harm and intimacy, of sexuality and humiliation. The emotional aspects of these works stem from Johanna's emotional transformation as she confronts her discomfort around the women she paints, instilled by her religious upbringing. In publicizing these feelings, the artist entrusts her discomfort to someone else, releasing her female specters from the safety of her mind into the danger of reality. As such, each artwork holds a prayer for these ghosts to ensure a safe passage to another realm. In a perfect world, the ghosts that haunt Johanna could simply disappear.

The escapist and slightly hypnagogic works of Martine Johanna are figurative within the realm of new contemporary realism, and embody the inner workings of a self-described “female chimerical house.” A symbolic paradoxical house that explores the mental fluctuations of an archetypical female roaming a predominantly male infrastructure, while trying to observantly experience her narratives within the social fabric she is part of. The painterly works, often on linen and panels, are made with acrylic in an optimistic prismatic color spectrum reminiscent of Fauvism and carry the atmosphere of Mid-century idealism.

Part of Johanna’s inspiration is drawn from childhood. The artist grew up in an environment structured by traditional gender divides, rules, and roles, with those more restrictive and judgemental towards girls. Being taught to personify what a girl should be and accept responsibility for victimhood, the artist sought an escape through cheap dime novels, TV programs, and fashion magazines, much like the screens and social media channels of today. It provided an escape into an illusive and ethereal world filled with fairytale castles and savior princes. Johanna’s female protagonists playfully exhibit the inner struggle between youthful naivety and adulthood, in an attempt to establish their own gender-driven identities and romantic inclinations while trying to fit into the world around them.