If you stared long at a screen
image without blinking and then closed your eyes, what you would see
for an instant, the memory of the image you were looking at, is
somehow close to the subject matter of what Priscilla Tea seems to be
capturing. Paintings that embed half-erased memories of images on
canvas with thick layer upon thick layer of paint.
Abstract landscapes of thoughts and negation, skate parks and palm trees in white and blue, these paintings appear as traffic signs from our subconscious image stream.
Studying these radically minimized
landscapes of memory, suddenly I have the urge to imagine that they
were made on a computer, I almost can recognize the software that
made them, almost but never completely, this software exists just one
level below my consciousness, if that was ever possible. Could we
sketch in our subconscious? Could we even have subconscious
computers? This is what their images would look like.
Through this invisible software, we
almost recognize places we have seen before, we almost
visualize skate parks and suburban swimming pools, we almost have a
sense of the continuous feeling of being on the edge of town, in a
softly abandoned suburbia. Yet maybe we are just imagining these,
maybe these paintings are just lines and blocks of color and some
shapes. Maybe these are abstract paintings after all. Even if we
doubt what is really shown here, somehow the images linger, like
retinal residue from screens and landscapes.
When you look at
Priscilla Tea's paintings in real life, the surface of the canvas
manifests an almost absurd insistence in the shape of these places,
because these horizon lines and suburban landscapes are painted over
and over so many times that the paint finally acquires a physical
depth, the paint itself becomes a place.
This sharp contradiction on how one
perceives the paintings online and how one experiences them
physically is perhaps one of the few ways we can enjoy painting
today. The physical object is allowed to be more than it's
representation. The painting is no longer just an image, it is a
physical object, a place even, and perhaps Priscilla Tea already is
just preparing the ground for places for which to feel this
nostalgia. The work understands the contemporary condition of looking
at too many images on screens all day long, of continuously mistaking
the real work for it's mechanical reproduction;
The question of painting in the age of
the screen persists.
Even in Art fairs, where you walk around to
see art, often times the place where you'll see the most paintings is
on the screens of the myriad ipads that art dealers have adopted in
their quest to sell more. Browsing paintings on an ipad is easier and
sometimes more pleasurable that walking about. Everything is crisp
and looks good on the ipad screen, better than the pages of art
magazines. So what can a painting offer that it's photograph doesn't
offer better? And what will happen to paintings when our walls become
touchscreens?
In Tea's most recent paintings, the
memories of the places she paints seem to have drowned, burned out,
cancelled by aggressive diagonal lines over them. This cancellation
is a place in itself, built up by slow, sure, endlessly, almost
maniacally repeated brushstrokes that complete a solid and ephemeral
image. This is painting at the moment when our culture has completely
digested it's digital revolution, screen and reality are one, online
friends are offline ghosts, and we survive every day in an endless
torrent of images, all gone by the time that we close our eyes,
except perhaps those insistent landscapes by Priscilla Tea.
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