Somatic Painting: Teresita Dennis’ Nervous Systems

exhibition text for teresita dennis’ nervous systems at block 336, London, 30 november 2019 - 18 january 202o

When looking at art, it is easy to consider the work as a product of the artist’s endeavour. Something created, certainly, but also something manufactured, something distinct from the artist’s self and body. In Teresita Dennis’ paintings, the work is inherently embodied. It is not that it represents the body or embodies Dennis in particular, more that we feel the presence of a body but it is shrouded, enfolded within the work. Layers of gesture; rhythms; repetitions and intensities come together to form a living work. In the same way that we can understand our bodily responses by isolating them into separate components (the fight or flight response can be divided into its components of an increased heart rate, shortness of breath, dilated pupils and trembling flesh), the layers of Dennis’ work can be peeled back to reveal the ways in which she has summoned the body and suggest the traces that she has chosen to leave behind. The gestural nature of Dennis’ work moves from the macro to the micro; from a sweeping of hands to the memory of a finger tip, tapping on canvas. 

The oldest work in Nervous Systems, Seeing the dark (2007), is central to the evolution of the other paintings. Made in response to her experience of loss, its opacity and thickness embodies the veil of grief that is initially impenetrable but becomes translucent over time; always present but, on lighter days, almost transparent. Anyone who has cared for a loved one through a terminal illness knows of the way in which you are desperate to hold, to absorb the intricacies of every touch once a presence that seemed infinite is hurtled startlingly and disorientatingly into the acutely finite. This holding is not only physical in the holding of a hand or the gestures of caring, it is a cradling - a holding someone up to allow them to pass. A fierce holding and a letting go. In this work, Dennis embodies the shape of this dichotomy, this pushing and pulling, sinking and rising, in a physical gesture. The repeated pattern of paint sweeping in downward, curving trajectories is almost womb-like, created by Dennis holding fistfuls of paint until her arms ached beyond endurance and she had to let it go, pulling the paint down the canvas as her arms released. She painted the work’s ground before performing this gesture, in the same deep blue that we see in the pattern here, and so the sweeping of the paint was performed without knowledge of it’s aesthetic resonance. The gesture is pure and deeply felt. She then worked back into the painting with the reds, greens and purples, harnessing the instability of colour to reveal the intensities of the gesture; its peaks and its hums. 

In Exstanting and Interfacing, painted at the edge of autumn this year, Dennis responds to Seeing the dark, with twelve years between that work and the new works we see in the gallery now. In Exstanting, the intensities of the colours waver, along with the marks, pulling the viewer in multiple directions. Dennis chooses her colours instinctively, based on what the paintings need at the moment of their conception. The golden tones of this painting, varying from yellows to umbers and made using transparent paint, are a step away from the opacity of the contrasting oranges and ultramarines in Seeing the dark. Perhaps this is because in this new work, Dennis isolates her original gesture into its component parts and performs the intensities of the colour. She has separated the gesture of caring, of grieving, into its distinct ‘holding’ and its ‘letting go’, an impossibility at the time of its experience. The fluidity of the colours here, and their harmonious existence, express the shape of transcendence, of paint being released, without the tension of endurance and holding beyond measure. In the very performance of this ‘letting go’, the painting is no longer a response; it becomes its own entity in the same way that the body recovers from a trauma and the psyche repairs. Dennis’ work does not necessarily explore what it is to grieve but what it is to renew and recalibrate, to separate the systems of the body and realise what kind of being you are.  

This transparency of paint also extends to the smaller works in Nervous Systems, particularly the Interface series. These works, painted following a number of operations that Dennis has had on her hands due to an ongoing condition that leaves her with chronic sensitivity and numbness in her fingers, explore the pricklings of embodiment; the sensation of fingertips on the nape of the neck when we feel threatened, or the heat that spreads to our collar bone under someone’s gaze. Dennis paints with small sections of her hands to explore the subtleties of the gestures that we constantly perform but do not have language for; the use of the softest part of a finger when wiping away a tear, or the curl of the knuckles when brushing a speck of dust from a screen. This imbues the work with a porosity that is at once both fragile and durable. We see this in taptaptaptap, the repeated actions of the edge Dennis’ finger imprinting the canvas and accumulating to create an almost kaleidoscopic effect, anchored yet elusive - a nuanced system.

In Nervous Systems, we see Dennis explore the incidences that occur in her painting; testing where her practice might go. For example, in Extant #4, Dennis has used a marbling comb to make an initial mark, and then dragged her finger across, repeating this gesture. Using tools is not new to Dennis’ work (many of her early works were created using tools such as whisks or bungees, which she would attach to her body and paint with performatively, harnessing the tool to gain some distance from her body) but it is something she has moved away from in recent years, preferring direct contact with the work. In this work, Dennis uses a tool not to separate her body from the painting, but to explore the relations between internal bodily sensations and the external forces imposed upon us. This gesture is carried out within a loose grid which initially makes the repeated patterns seem homogenous but their differences are revealed in the intricacies of each mark; the creases of skin revealed. The body unfurls like the veins in the petal of a flower. 

There is an engagement with the notion of the screen in these newer works. The way Dennis applies paint in intimate, repetitive gestures mimics the repetition of our fingers on the screens of our devices, building layers of translucent marks. These traces, only visible when the screen is switched off, reveal fingerprints; markings of the imperfection of our constant searchings. Dennis plays with the idea of the screen, both in its function as an interface and also in the Lacanian sense, exploring the impossibility of perceiving the world as it is and our internal imperative to extend our attention, to constantly look beyond our present reality. The screen is alluded to in its imperfection, in the possibility of its corruption/disruption. For example, in Interfacing, the incorporation of green marks within the yellows, oranges and browns of the painting’s majority, ruptures the work’s surface, suggesting a coolness beyond our initial perception of warmth. The green is an opening here, suggestive of the thickness and depth of surface, in spite of the transparency of Dennis’ paint. In the same way that our bodies exist and cohabit the interior and exterior, seeping and moving, these paintings ask what’s beneath our vision, beyond our perception of the work. Dennis’ tapping on this surface, tapping on this screen, is her probing into our systems; both bodily and nervous.