Greta Waller
GRETA WALLER
In easel-sized canvases, the artist continues her investigation of the still life as an exposition of paintings temporal character; a struggle to harness the ceaseless motion or changing state of objects in the world. With a tightly-focused haste to the painterly surfaces, Waller's figurative works are almost puritanical in their doubts and convictions about the experience of seeing as it is evoked in painting.
In a recent group of works, Waller's stark palette defines hovering, closeup perspectives on large, irregular blocks of ice melting in unassuming, periwinkle-trimmed dishes; lit by artificial light. The ice, in the process of changing states (melting into water), evokes the artists iconographic practice:
"My goal in painting has evolved into the task of solidifying the changing object, and ultimately providing a new perspective on how that arrested object might stereotypically exist in the perception of my viewer and myself. I have yet to pin down what reality is, but I choose painting as a means to investigate it. Painting becomes a process of constant struggle to harness that which is fleeting; a reality always in motionin terms of light, local perception, and time. When I say that I come to know my reality through the instrument of painting I want it to be understood that it is a choice I have made in order to confront the ephemeral. When I look at a painting I completed years ago it has the incredible ability to transport me back to that moment embodied in space and time. Im able to smell the air, perhaps feel the sun, or remember my frustrations at the time. My paintings are irreplaceable and brutally honest documents of my life, my labor, and my desires. Although the paintings are reflections of the objects before me, what the canvas accumulate becomes more than a reflection. My paintings are a meditation on myself."
The paintings carry out this Apollonian task; penetrating the stasis of the image on canvas by presenting objects thatin being seenare experienced as having potential energy; that are for instance melting or burning; that are raw; that may spoil. The recurrence of subjects alluding to staples or necessitiesblocks of ice or cuts of meat, with their ephemeral textural behaviorsare paid a perverse attention in the sparsely populated paintings, as if they were luxuries in a context of scarcity.
Greta Waller has exhibited in group shows in Los Angeles and New York and is completing her MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Flank by Flank
2011
Oil on Canvas
44 x 47 inches
