Plastic is the Colour Fantastik Plastik, a solo exhibition by Anya Pesce at Factory 49 April 2016 Fantastik Plastik, as the title suggests is an accented, heady celebration of the colour-form poised in swirling motion. In this body of work created by Anya Pesce, rectilinear monochrome painting has left the wall, dressed itself up in its brightest and shiniest paint skins and entered the gallery space in a skirt-lifting dance. If painting were a skin, or drapery rippling over skin, these works celebrate the liquidity of paint spreading over a surface. It is a deliberately sensuous show, and in this seduction by formal norms of beauty, it gently coaxes the viewer from the position of gazer to that of consumer. For here, surface, colour and form are united in plastic in an exhibition that plays with the idea of what contemporary painting is. We can say that it is abstract, nonobjective, about colour and form and our perception of those things, but we live in an age of plastic, so much more baggage to look at paintings with. Plastic is the colour. Anya works with ready-made colour, selecting those intense, saturated hues that evoke the aesthetics of the display counter or buy-me packaging. In the works, there is a tendency to replicate the colours of specifically female-targeted consumerism; of cosmetics, lipsticks and handbags. Or it could be that she just likes bright colour. And a lot of it is red. After all, she isn’t using actual red lipstick, as L.A. artist Rachel Lachowicz does, but perhaps she may as well be. The painting pouts.
Artist Anya Pesce with her works at Factory 49 (Photograph: Jim Gurieff)