Tatiana Pozzo di Borgo

Tatiana Pozzo di Borgo, an artist living and working in Lacelle, Corrèze, presents her new suite of tonal paintings. She works through serial observation of objects, emptying them of their day to day associations and infusing them with a sense of loss and mourning. Her work explores the modern traditions that led to the rethinking of representation in painting while being oriented towards the social re-examination and restructuring of an artistic community.

The listless presence and hovering negativity of the small paintings evoke the ghosts of past grief who surface in apparitions of lost friends, social conditions, companion species, ecologies… Losses that accumulate in all lives and reveal a complex architecture of past pain dredged up by new crises. The paintings resemble a psychological platform for grief processes. Their Muddy greys and dusty silence offer a space out of joint with time.

Positioned to the right, but still the first picture you see, is a painting that looks as if it has been interrupted twice. Though at first it seems abstract, it begins to look like a portrait that was started but never finished, it is hazy and blurred. It was then placed on its side in its abandoned form, and the beginning of a new sketch laid over it and also abandoned. It is as if a ghost lingers here. What looks like abstraction in this canvas is in fact the not-yet, mingling with the once-was; a girl in a blue raincoat under a drawing of a bottle of water (perhaps?). It is this feeling of being in tension between two times, of being haunted by a past and a future, that marks Pozzo di Borgo’s work.

The exhibition unfolds through a series of paintings of egg boxes and eggs in their boxes, open but not all the same. The eggs and the spaces left by the eggs blend into each other. The brush marks tend to form a grid, replaying modernist gestures for revealing the image in its materiality. On the surface, these paintings could be an exercise in simplicity & restraint and an unembellished hope for finitude and quiet. However the stillness of the work is pregnant with questions that open geometrically forward rather than backwards, towards futures.