First Contentful Paint

About

SomoS Arthouse is excited to present "First Contentful Paint", the first solo exhibition by visual artist Leigh Cunningham in Europe, showing paintings created during her artist residency at SomoS in fall 2021. In her post-internet vignettes, Leigh Cunningham depicts everyday scenes sourced from on- and offline imagery. Skillfully rendered in a blurring oil painting technique, her images take on an intriguing hazy characteristic, their unplaceable familiarity conveying a sense of universality and communality, albeit hidden in the collective (online) unconscious.

As Cunningham states, 

“My work deals with ideas behind ways of seeing and what constitutes an image. I am interested in exploring the language of detail and evaluating what can be gleaned from vestiges, reflections and shadows. My paintings consist of hazy colors bleeding into each other, suggesting that there is no separation from ourselves and our surroundings or other people. These distortions serve to show how our understanding of ourselves dissolves at the edges, an obscurity ultimately revealing something at once beautiful and disturbing.

Translating digital missteps into traditional mediums, my paintings reference the pitfalls of technologies over time; fuzzy images materializing from halftone static or out-of-focus photos loading within apps on our smartphones. The act of waiting puts the images and the viewer at an interval between presence and absence, appearing and disappearing. These moments of cinematic waiting yield to images that are soft, disorienting, and often more beautiful than what we expected, as long as we catch them before they become ordinary and recognizable.”

In art history, paintings are considered to last forever, similar to the notion of everything staying on the internet eternally. Cunningham’s works refer to this relationship between the digital image and painting, creating a communication between the traditional and the contemporary. The artist looks at the relation between photography and painting in societies marked by the internet. The keen attention to the screen-based image and the psychology of its consumption lends her work its currency.

Read more about “First Contentful Paint”: https://somos.media/ra

About Leigh Cunningham: New York/ New Jersey-based visual artist Leigh Cunningham (1991) graduated with honors at Parsons New School of Design in New York in 2013. She had her first solo exhibition in 2014, Faces Revealed, at the Cowwarr Art Space, in Victoria, Australia. Her work has been presented in the U.S.A. and Philippines; most recently in 2018, in her last exhibition, Melted City 4.3 at Yui Gallery, NYC. In 2013, her illustrations were selected by The American Illustration 32 and The American Illustration Web Archive; in 2010 she won the Bologna Children’s Book Fair Award.