Blue Note 1 January
– 4 February 2023
More on the artist
This isn’t what Chris Casali
intended to show in SLOT.
She broke the news gently in
an email – “I was in two minds…what to show …. I have been developing new work alongside my
watercolours and thought to show a painting …Like most of my work it's abstract
with hints to the land…Is it a problem…I've never shown work like this before… Hmmmm
just not sure that's all and thought to write.”
Not being sure might be the prevailing state of
mind for an artist. If so, becoming sure would be their aim and working out
what they can be sure of would be what they do. In conversation Chris described
it as her process, that is how she goes about making a painting. “It’s a slow revelation
of detail that causes the work to be always giving and not predictable” is how
she put it.
There are romantic edges to Chris’s process. She
described travelling with friends through the Australian desert, of making
paintings on the ground and drying them in the branches of trees. But mainly it
happens for Chris in her studio. A room, like most other studios, more or less
empty and away from most other things where a kind of meditation begins. One
thing leads to another, which often enough seems to be an act of desperation.
Because like a caged animal, artists will try anything, take any risk to realise
their work, in a bid for freedom that remains nothing more than a half-glimpsed
possibility.
And so it might be with Chris’s painting. A single
sweeping gesture poured over a deftly crafted canvas that hints at details
drawn in the landscape. Is this a rock pool with a crest of foam left as the
tide recedes? Or a kind of Xray of the
desert she recently visited? A landscape perversely sculpted by water – driven
by the same gravity that dictates the flows and splashes of Chris’s paint,
applied in hope of realising sureness. It is however, whatever you see it as.
But how does Chris see it? – exactly as you see it
here. Not the step before, or the step after that she might have taken next – it
is this step that she is sure of. The watercolour on paper that became an
acrylic painting on canvas that replaced her planed exhibit in a process, where
possibilities are examined without predigest, is of course exactly what Chris Casali intended to show in SLOT. This is
the summation of her process.
Tony Twigg
