Priscilla Tea. Screen Trauma

About

Neumeister Bar-Am present Screen Trauma, the first solo show of Italian painter Priscilla Tea (1983) in Germany.

The title, borrowed from friend and collaborator Gerardo Contreras of Preteen Gallery, reflects upon the theory of Screen Memory (Sigmund Freud - 1899) described as:
any memory which functions to hide (and to derivatively express) another – typically unconscious, mental content.

To understand the relationship between Tea’s serene paintings, and this theory one could unpack the Joycean density in Gerardo Contreras’s texts; for example – screen’s multiple meanings; of blocking out, camouflage, providing shelter or protection, to separate or divide – and also as reference to the LCD, laptop or phone and touch-screen – the wretchedness of – are all present in the paintings of Tea.

Her paintings are huge, analogic and meditative creations of space, the uninhabitable landscape and gestures familiar to the screen are translated with delicate emphasis
into physical form. They could be seen to be blocking out, providing protection from the onslaught of traumatic imagery on-screen. They could also be seen as a memory themselves, a foggy and subjective remembering of a space: a sublime interpretation of a poor image.

Priscilla Tea’s notes:

The paintings have all the same color, its a very pale color (grey/ light blu) that connects with the feeling of fog and extends in it. Its like the paintings expand in the gallery space and vice versa.
The fog reminds me of those online landscapes where the image is being downloaded and it shows the fog and when you move sometimes the new space and perspective appear from the fog, like the fog is passage between the memory and the image to become.
These new paintings relate with this idea, depicting spaces in the moment before becoming a defined landscape, a space in between, like pre-spaces.