Please join us for the opening on Thursday, 4 May from 6 to 8 p.m.
Shirley Wiitasalo’s most recent paintings have a characteristically reductive vocabulary: colour, shape, texture. The gallery’s first floor presents a continuation of her Distant series. Here, colour spreads across six monochromes — Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Violet to become a study in variation. While upstairs, the paintings’ foregrounded blue image plane suggests subject matter as atmosphere, both present and absent.
For several years, Wiitasalo has explored various methods of application whereby the viscosity of paint performs a physical negotiation between two surfaces. By transferring paint from one surface to the canvas, the romance associated with the act of painting shifts to a practice of pragmatism and recurrence. However, as a technical operation, transferring does not produce fixed predictable results. Material and information is altered or lost through physical mediation to produce work that plays in the space between chance and control. For philosopher Vilém Flusser, the task of technical images is “to produce improbable, informative situations to consolidate invisible possibilities into visible improbabilities.” Prone to accidents, technical images are linked to a creative universe that is full of potential in which a sphere could represent either positive or negative space; an aperture or a sun spot; ultra-magnified microscopic entities or moons orbiting a distant star.
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