For his new collection of work in Wrong Shapes, TRNZ continues to eschew painting fantastical scenes, opting to memorialise, instead, images that would exist within the realm of possibility. A boy working on a model of the solar system, a girl in an angel costume, bike rides and a lazy afternoon with the family dog. The space makes sense, and the objects are not surreal. Often, these reimagine the stories adjacent to our own experiences of growing up.

Working from Mark Strand’s poem, “Keeping Things Whole”, TRNZ focusses on the opening lines:

“In a field

I am the absence

of field.”^[1]

For him, this speaks to both the body as something that holds space together, but also as something that is almost incidental to the space around it. “The field is still a field,” TRNZ insists. His paintings reckon with the notion of absence acting as presence. Regarding the self as the absence of space — therefore, as a presence in itself, in that it is tangible and in that it exists — does not negate what surrounds it. The image space doesn’t shift with the insertion of figures: “The field is still a field.” And yet, it isn’t quite the same.

The presence of the figures in the scenes he imagines do not necessarily transform the spaces themselves, at least not in a permanent way. These spaces continue to exist whether or not the figures (in this case, the people he populates his paintings with) are in it. When a subject enters the space, our perception of the space shifts depending on where we or the subjects are situated. The seamlessness of the space is removed, momentarily: the shelves don’t quite align, a body blocks the view that would have otherwise been perfectly perceptible had they not entered the picture.

But in these paintings, they have, and TRNZ captures the misalignment that happens, in that precise moment, from that precise perspective. In reality, these shifts happen with unencumbered ease. Even without much movement, we can change the spaces we occupy, through subtle breaths, strands of hair moving across the air, or an involuntary twitch. The space remains the same space, on one level, but all these tiny changes that occur shift the world around us in, both in big and small ways. The resulting images in these paintings are snapshots of a scene where that small movement is still, a single frame from millions, preserved.

— Carina Santos

^[1] Mark Strand, “Keeping Things Whole” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1979, 1980 by Mark Strand.