corri-lynn tetz

SOFT TOUCH: OCTOBER 9TH - 31ST, 2020

Corri-Lynn Tetz’s work focuses on the female figure as a way to explore identity, sensation and desire. Working from personal archives, fashion photography, film and pornography, she is interested in the ways images and meaning are transformed through painting and how this process disrupts notions of the gaze to re-imagine pictorial space. In this, intuitive paint handling distances each piece from its source, as she often uses disparate colour, and inventive figuration, to create the impression of transformation, affect and sensation. Her intention is that each painting occupies a space between representation and abstraction - that form provides enough information to convey bodies and space, without losing the immediacy of that first, energized, layer of paint. 

In the past year, Tetz has focused her paintings on representations of feminine sexuality. Working from ‘80s and ‘90s porn, she is interested in the ways painting unexpectedly transforms the meaning of the images and how it disrupts the primacy of the male gaze. In these images, newly embodied figures are acting on their own terms and in their own skin, free from the shame, class and dogma that might complicate the viewers relationship to such overt expressions of female sexuality. 

For Soft Touch, Tetz made the decision to work almost entirely in a monochromatic palette, setting aside her signature flashes of saturated colour and intense underpaintings, for a more subdued and meditative approach. Citing anxiety and a need for simplification during the spring lockdown, these paintings reflect the artists desire for pleasure and comfort in the act of painting. The results are images of women, alone and taking care of themselves. As Corri-Lynn wrote, “I felt comforted. The women in my paintings seemed like they did too. They felt further away from the magazines I found them in. Suddenly they were just women taking care of themselves… having a moment with their own soft touch.”