Rebecca Guez
Big Painting

28 September-12 October 2019
Thames-Side Studios Gallery 
A TEXT WRITTEN BY THOMAS GREIG AND BILLY CROSBY. 2019 
Rebecca’s big paintings affect us on an environmental scale, physically filling the frame of our eyesight, their scale impacting our bodies, towering over us. These big canvases hold within them different affects of time and gesture. Emotion, form and colour interweaving into a particular material sensibility. They are agents of feeling.
Having the right frame of mind is crucial for Rebecca to make a painting. The environment must be right. A certain calmness and contemplative atmosphere is required, devoid of any particular worries. This place can take a long time to get to, it’s as if painting for her is a moment to forget about all other things.
The gestation period for a painting is often months or years, informed by latent problems from other paintings. This tussling of feeling, between conception and result, is where new threads of energy are found, informing new and old paintings alike.
Rebecca’s process is one of controlled chance. She makes her paintings on the ground, very quickly, pouring and brushing large amounts of loose oil paint, over slackly stretched canvas.  Underneath the painting are crumpled heaps of raw canvas, making the painting look lumpen, like a pie’s pastry lid. These mounds are central to the painting, determining the limits of its topography; absorbing and dispersing paint.
The paintings test the limits of her body. Due to the size of the canvases she must physically stand on the work. In order to make a mark that exceeds the stretch of her body she will have to run across while pouring. Once dry the canvas is re-stretched to display the reverse of the painting as the front. Bearing its insides on the outside, all marks of her hand disappear. The un-stretched pieces of canvas from underneath are another step removed from this. Their residual marks are a kind of distillation of affect, condensed into a potent residue. Birthed from the belly of the painting they unfurl, tall above us.
Once done, Rebecca must let the painting go. The physical act, functions as a kind of mental and bodily release. As it slowly soaks and dries the painting changes and when reversed she must come to accept it on its own terms.