Cecilia Granara at Exo Exo

Artist: Cecilia Granara

Exhibition title: No love without grief

Venue: Exo Exo, Paris, France

Date: October 15 – November 19, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Exo Exo

Dear paintings,

You’ve been in the making for years, just like me. I’ve been looking at your ancestors since I was a child.

I knew I wanted to grow up and spend time not just looking, but making you. I went to art school determined to become a painter.

Ironically my years at art school crushed both of us. I questioned whether painting was even relevant any more. The culture at that time was anti-figurative painting (now, of course, everyone is obsessed with you. Perhaps in five years’ time, everyone will be sick of you again).

During the years I spent studying you and your history, I was told all kinds of made up rules about what was good and bad painting. Professors tried to push me away from you. I was made to feel that both you and I were too feminine, too emotional, or the worst crime: superficial.

Especially when it came to color. Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge color from our culture, to devalue color, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity. Color is seen as feminine, oriental, superficial, cosmetic, infantile, vulgar , narcotic.1

But when I’m with you, I can make a place of my own. Color is disorder and liberty.2

When I’m with you, I can be everything I’ve been told I shouldn’t be. Color is dangerous, or trivial, or both.3

When I’m with you, I can make a place to go when I’m in grief. This feels important, because since I rejected my religious upbringing, I still feel the need to be in communion with something bigger than my individualistic little self. We see color partly with our eyes, partly with our brains, Partly with a culture that has enveloped us since the beginning of our days. With color there is always something more than meets the eye.4

When I’m with you, I can make a place to go to when I’m depressed. When I’m anxious. When I’m burnt out. I know many of us are. It’s the state of my generation. Color is a drug, a drug that can intoxicate or cure.5

When I’m with you, I can make a place to visit sadness. I recently learned the difference between sadness and despair. Sadness is being fi lled to the brim with intense emotion. Sadness is a sense of fullness, so complete and overwhelming, it brings the liquids out of your eyes. Despair, on the other hand, is the absence of hope. It’s interesting that historically, rainbows symbolize hope. Because I think you bring me hope in the smallest of ways: you surprise me.

When I’m with you, I can make a place to celebrate eros and love. The making of love, the channeling of love. The type of love that is gathered through chosen abstinence.

When I’m with you, I can try to represent the strange apparitions of the mind. When I’m with you I can grapple with death. Color is a lapse into decadence and a recovery of innocence, a false addition to a surface and the truth beneath that surface.6

When I’m with you I can paint difficult things, softly.

Th ank you, I love you, I’m excited to share you with whoever will accept both of us. The rest don’t matter, or haven’t really understood us yet.

Your devoted companion,

Cecilia

[1] David Batchelor, Chromophobia
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid
[4] “On color”, Professor David Caston, Yale University Press Podcast. Episode 61
[5] David Batchelor, Chromophobia
[6] Ibid