I look at the floor and ask myself where I am standing; the floor is what supports my place in life. What is that place? In this life I suddenly felt confused, incoherent, full of contradictions. And who doesn't? I was supposedly heading toward a place full of colored dots, but suddenly I feel far from that premise I was meant to travel.
I look at the floor and ask myself where I am standing; the floor is what supports my place in life. What is that place? In this life I suddenly felt confused, incoherent, full of contradictions. And who doesn't? I was supposedly heading toward a place full of colored dots, but suddenly I feel far from that premise I was meant to travel.
This is how this series of paintings came about, a sum of exercises seeking to find new forms, stubbornly and capriciously. They start from observations of the floor, out of a deep fascination with the ornament and color of these tiles, and how these interweave with the need for color as a language of expression for the life force that answers the question of life. The grays, as a way of making visible the color and the life of the many women who clean the floors of the school where I work, are the driving force of this series.
Doing one's job: like Sisyphus[1], is the fate of whoever must sweep and clean a floor their whole life in order to feed their children, and in that daily, steady, demanding work, the parenthesis of life appears: the possibility of asking about luck, fate, duty. A question that, paradoxically, offers no possibility of another fate, since there is no answer that changes that fate.
And so, from my purest sensibility, comes the pleasure of color, palettes, and color wheels, as the rational side of painting. The fluidity of the medium in relation to the incalculable nature of every pictorial desire. The images that swarm in my head as free associations arising from contact with the sensuality of pictorial matter. And the tireless repetition as an exercise in resistance.
The tireless repetition of color, of ornament, of making and remaking and remaking, is simply the act of resistance needed to account for the time of freedom that we do not have in the capitalist world we inhabit. This is how I got here.
Lina Sinisterra
Artist
[1]Sisyphus in Greek mythology “is known for his punishment: carrying a stone to the top of a mountain, and before reaching it, the stone would roll back down again (repeating the frustrating process over and over)”