MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique in Paris has opened Fire, Water, Time, a new exhibition by the self-taught American painter Jessie Homer French, on view from 10 to 21 November 2026. The show gathers recent paintings that move from lakeshores to a desert plain, from a forest in flames to a small-town post office — places the artist knows well and paints with evident affection, even as beauty sits next to something fragile.

French has spent more than five decades painting the land around her, in calm, flat, carefully patterned pictures in which something is always happening beneath the surface. Her home has changed over the years, from Los Angeles to Vancouver Island, the California desert and now Ojai, but her way of working has not: she stays with the place she lives in and, through it, tells a larger story about our time.

Fire is one of her great subjects. She first painted it in the early 1980s, after watching a controlled burn and finding it beautiful, and she still sees it as something that both destroys and renews. In The Burning Pine Tree, a single pine glows from within, its last green tufts holding on at the top, while another canvas carries a line from the prophet Malachi beneath a burning forest — a day that shall burn as an oven, leaving neither root nor branch.

Against all this burning stands something that has quietly endured. King Clone Coyote shows a stretch of Mojave Desert where a creosote ring near Lucerne Valley, grown from a single seed around 11,700 years ago, counts among the oldest living things on Earth. Born in New York in 1940, French now lives and works in Oak View, California, and her work is held by the Palm Springs Art Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.