Procesual Painting

2023

Painting, installation

A series of large-format canvases centered around notions of power and its possession. In this series, painting turns into an object that loses its illustrative qualities, and the transition process carried out on the material becomes important. This process endows the canvas with certain new qualities (color, texture, damage) or transforms the existing ones. The object turns into a kind of social body, of which the author is a part, subject to gradual external change. The process of working on the canvas is intense and fierce — painting in this case is not the goal, but acts as a comfortable and familiar language for the author, a purely attuned instrument expressing the coercive nature of change — and the application of power. Paint, pigments and glue are forcibly rubbed into the matter, causing it to deform, extend and tear. Once the process is complete, the canvas becomes an entity filled with traces of presence, transformation, damage and ascension.

Procesual Painting began as a continuation of the Talking Heads paintings, so portrait outlines, silhouettes of heads are evident in the early works of this series. The portraits/heads in this case do not reflect any personification, emotion, or humanity, acting as an empty photo for documents — a faceless presence. In the later objects, their features disappear completely, smudged and deliberately erased, leaving a dull pictorial space of color.