Teresita Dennis

Here I Am

25 January - 8 March 2008

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Tender, 230 x 300cm, 2006, oil on canvas

Using the whole of he her body to make marks, Teresita Dennis physically positions herself ‘absolutely and unashamedly’ within the visible field of her paintings and offers its traces to them as an integral component in the history of the paintings’ construction.

Here I Am, 52 x 75cm, 2007, mixed media on paper

She contests the notion that the ‘beginning’ of a new work happens the moment a mark is made and she explores the possibility that for her, a painting begins elsewhere: “In silence, in the aftermath of an Event, when a body is affected. It begins by not being able to say something and with the identification of an experience of the senses, sensing”.

Seeing the dark, 220 x 280cm, 2005, oil on canvas

She considers that a body “is moved by the events of a life; a stutter, a flinch, a readiness to smile, a propensity to hold and be held, a turning away or toward” and with deliberation she “performs these movements with my body, for the painting”.

Wanting, 2008, oil on canvas, 152 x 152cm

Such actions might be seen as an attempt to simply open her work up to, what she would say, is “a necessaryconfession: I have a body and a life that corresponds to it. I am involved, interested, integral”, but she has a more radical declaration at play in her fidelity to painting’s potential.

Between eyes and fingertips, 2007, oil on canvas, 41 x 51cm

‘Here I am’, the title of this show of new works, announces the arrival not only of this painter’s physical presence in the work, nor of the paintings’ themselves. Indeed, the declaration; Here I am ‘intends to expose these two occasions of appearance, as a continuum, an unbroken surface, an event of being for which painting is its’ face.’
Being faced by such work is to be confronted by the artists’ desire to make sensible, the work of painting. “To make it happen that the paintings produce something visibly and physically sensible, a mixing up of the relationships between the organs of sense and a sense of the world. The way in which, it seems, we actually experience something happening.’
So the paintings become, not an autobiography, or a representation but a performance of painting: a work, working.

Teresita Dennis was born in London in 1961. She attended Goldsmiths College, London from 1992-1995 and the Royal College of Art, London from 1996-98 where she obtained an M.A. in Painting. She is currently doing a PhD in Painting at the Royal College of Art. Dennis lives and works in London.