Christina Pataialii

Christina Pataialii’s paintings are immediately recognisable for their bold gestures, singular palette and an aching sense of familiarity. Given the predominantly abstract nature of Pataialii’s work, it can be hard to put a finger on the origin of such a feeling, which could be catalysed by a gesture or colour rather than the more literal symbols and figures that have become less elusive in her most recent paintings.

If Pataialii’s practice can be said to consistently capture one thing, it is the feeling of liminality, of existing in between things: between experience and memory, body and painting, inside and outside, history and metaphor. Earlier works such as those in her 2018 MFA exhibition, Slow Jams Till Midnight, and her subsequent solo exhibition Solid Gold at Te Tuhi in 2019, responded to her upbringing in the central suburbs of Tāmaki Makaurau, borrowing the sun-bleached palette of state housing and spiky forms of rugby posts to investigate the slippages between self, place and belonging. More recently, Pataialii has leaned further into figuration, employing the hard lines of architecture as evocations of experience and memory, as well as solutions to painterly problems. A bridge, a mountain, an open window, a dark stairwell, these routine forms become compositional armatures around which Pataialii experiments with her materials – usually acrylic and housepaint – and palette.

While these easily recognisable forms may offer ways of understanding these works within the genres of landscape and interior paintings, Pataialii’s layering of thin washes, opaque shapes and loose gestures deny effortless interpretation of a scene, complicating the viewers experience of the painting space.

It is in this oscillating between abstraction and representation that the familiar can be found, but it can just as easily be obscured. In Pataialii’s paintings, as in life, the sense of recognition is hard to parse into language, occurring in the swirl of shapes and hues that have already acted upon us before we have even tried to make sense of them.

Since graduating from Whitecliffe School of Fine Arts in 2018 with a Master of Fine Arts, Pataialii has shown regularly across the motu and internationally. Recent highlights include a significant solo exhibition, Proximity & Distance, Tauranga Art Gallery (2021), and her selection as the only artist from Aotearoa to participate in the New Museum triennial, Soft Water Hard Stone (2022).