4 November 2021 – 30 January 2022
Corri-Lynn Tetz, Heel, 2021.
A series of paintings by Corri-Lynn Tetz, with monosyllabic titles such as Piano, Heels, and Ghost, depict women in various stages of contemplation. They share a palette as well—as if rose-coloured glasses were swapped out for a cool blue lens, dusting its subject with built-in melancholia. The monochrome greys and blues read like an x-ray—offering an interior perspective.
Corri-Lynn Tetz, Flower, 2020.
Are these women sad? Bored? Worried? The habit of showing beautiful women, especially in erotic images, as happy creates a flatness that Tetz fights against. Instead, Tetz portrays the underlying condition of the subjects’ glossy exterior. In Flower a woman looks down at the flower she is holding next to her vulva, her legs open. She is wearing a delicate chemise and her bangs are swept to the side as she sits on a bed of fun fur. The spectrum of textures is deftly painted by Tetz in a limited colour palette. The figure’s hand is hovering a few inches from her cheek in resignation mixed with boredom. The flower does not seem to give her any pleasure. The metaphor is almost too easy to draw.
The French writer Hervé Guibert captures the soft suggestion of erotic photographs in his 1982 book of essays Ghost Image. “What excited me in this picture, which was really quite chaste and mimicked the studio pose of a baby’s pink and powdered behind, were the breasts that were not shown, and especially to imagine the contact between the breasts and fur, of those two soft globes being compressed by a material even more diabolically soft,” he writes. The description could easily fit a number of paintings by Tetz. The tactile surroundings—full of mirrors and fauna, armchairs and silk—allow the viewer to situate themselves in the aesthetically dense environment of the recent past. Slightly patinated by time, the paintings excite in their removal from everyday reality.
Corri-Lynn Tetz, Ghost, 2020.
Guibert goes on to differentiate between erotic images, which the viewer projects their fantasies onto, and pornographic images, which are static and therefore damper the viewer’s ability to project. The literal quality of porn is dictated by the gaze and imagination of the photographer. Tetz’s paintings are firmly in the camp of the erotic—Tetz allows the viewer mobility to explore the content matter.
The paintings in Art Lover, span from 2019 to 2021 and are painted primarily from archival images from the 80s and 90s. Divorced from the original source material, the gaze is reclaimed from the (primarily) male photographers. Tetz transposes her gaze on top of the existing image and shifts the focus; contemplation and sentiment emerge. In Crane, the model’s face is hidden, cut off by the top of the canvas. Even without facial cues, the impact resonates. With a hand on a knee and feet arched, the figure retains a powerful agency. This is a credit to Tetz’s deftness with a brushstroke and understanding of people’s deep physiological need to be seen.
Corri-Lynn Tetz, Crane, 2021.
Alongside the scantily clad figures and lush settings, accessories are abound in these paintings. Notably: high heels, mirrors, tights, and tan lines. Despite the softness of the bodies, the accessories present an erotic fixation on the performative actions of femininity. Via props, the models take on the role of the helpless heroine or mischievous nymphette. Often both. The coded nature of femininity, sex, and desire, create familiar narratives.
While the subject captivates (as naked people tend to do), these are painting-first paintings. Tetz’s attention to the application of paint grants her the ability to explore complicated, and perhaps controversial, subject matter. If squinting slightly, the looseness of the figure blurs and becomes a series of swift brushstrokes in diffused colours. The result is paintings that drip with atmosphere, distinct with aura.. The role of the body and sex takes on a secondary role to the complex emotional life that’s captured in pigment—without discounting the possibility of the female form as sensuous, feminine, and sexual. In Tetz’s work, emotional gravity and the complexity of performed femininity are centre-fold.
– Text by Tatum Dooley
Corri-Lynn Tetz works as a painter, focusing on the female figure as a way to explore identity, sensation and desire. Borrowing 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.
Corri-Lynn Tetz, Puffed Sleeves, oil on canvas, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Norberg Hall.
Invested in ritual, communal intimacy and strange mystical events, Tetz’s paintings are drawn from the romantic histories of a figure in landscape and the seemingly endless possibilities of surface and form. Evoking memory or a distant, artificial arcadia, the affect is often more poetic than narrative—with bodies and nature activated through inventive figuration, high key and muted colour combinations, abstract interventions and intuitive gestures. Tetz’s works speak to the history of painting, assumptions of viewership and authorship, as well as the ways she sees the performance of femininity both absorbed and rejected.
Corri-Lynn Tetz, photo by James A. Rosen.
Biography
Corri-Lynn Tetz
(she/her)
Corri-Lynn Tetz was born in Calgary, Alberta and now lives and works in Montreal. She studied at Red Deer College, Emily Carr and most recently graduated from the MFA program at Concordia University. Tetz has received project support from the Conseil des Art et des Lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, and in 2016, was awarded the Brucebo Residency Fellowship. Her work was featured in The Magenta Foundation’s Carte Blanche: A Survey of Canadian Painting and in 2012, she was a finalist is in the RBC Painting Competition. Tetz’s paintings have been exhibited across Canada, Sweden and the United States, with acquisitions made by the Senvest Collection and Equity Bank among others.
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Barbara Palmer
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