Christina Pataialii is a painter of multiplicity. The works in On the Lam, her first dealer gallery show, are marked by an assured visual brevity, giving you more the more time you give them. They’ve an immediate and enduring formal and sensual appeal. The mint green background of Ace in the Hole is the work’s own winning card. It tugs at my visual memory days after encountering it for the first time. The pleasure Pataialii takes in constructing images from the various pigment-based media she uses—from the house paint that has become something of a trademark, to the charcoal she scrubs into her stretched drop-cloth supports—is palpable. She has not chosen to work as she does because painting is a prestige and saleable form; it is simply her language. …
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Continue reading in Art New Zealand 170 (winter 2019): 42.
