Matina Partosa’s My bones awaken in a dream offers us a language that attends to “painting as an insight to a different scale of time than that experienced by the human body.” This is a motif endlessly rehearsed not only in relation to painting itself, but art in general: vita brevis, ars longa. Art outlives. In Partosa’s hands, this motif is given new inflection: if painting becomes an object that plays out this more-than-human, civilizational, or even geological time, what does it make of the labor of the painterly–the work of gesture and stroke, color, light and shadow? In Partosa’s practice, the painterly imbibes surface with atmosphere–not just mood or ambience, but a layer of life where time elapses, things happen, the quality of light changes and colors advance or recede. The painterly materializes the present–as if you are seeing light shift now, right in front of you. Color is, in this case and for Partosa, “a potent vehicle for transcendence, using vibrance to make an image sing.” Vibrant: pulsating, full of vitality. It is the painterly that renders these qualities palpable.
Text excerpt: Carlos Quijon Jr.
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