UNPAINTINGS

Recent works by Chesca Co

Painting is often understood as an act of accumulation: pigment laid upon a surface until an image arrives. The works in Unpaintings move in a different direction. Rather than constructing fixed images, they operate through interruption, revision, displacement, and return. Marks are added, obscured, redirected, and reconsidered.

The works in this exhibition arise from a new approach to beginning. Developed through earlier studies and ongoing inquiries—including the 100-Day Project (2023) and the frameworks of Unalphabetic (2021), Noise (2021), and Stroke (2016)—they navigate different states of attention, from sustained observation to drift, interruption, and return.

Across the exhibition, landscape functions less as depiction than as a structure for navigation. These are not landscapes of place but of thought, memory, and dreaming.

Forms drift between recognition and abstraction. Gestures become traces of movement through uncertain terrain. Fragments appear and dissolve before settling into fixed identities.

The term unpainting does not describe erasure, nor does it suggest the negation of painting. Instead, it proposes a practice of remaining open to revision—a refusal of completion as a final state.

Taken together, these works suggest that a painting does not begin with an image, but with a condition of attention. Meaning emerges through repetition, deviation, and return, allowing each work to discover its own form rather than fulfill a predetermined one.