Like so many people today Jill Paz is both and between. Born in the Philippines but leaving as a one year old for Canada, educated there and in the USA, married to a US citizen, she returned to the Philippines four years ago. The works by which she as an artist became known took both as material and imagery that emblem of the Filipino diaspore or migration, the balikbayan box, and the paintings of the renowned Filipino painter Félix Resurrecíon Hidalgo, her great grand uncle.

To use such subject matter was a way of musing on her own situation: in some ways perhaps both Canadian and Filipino, but also perhaps between these different identities.

It may not be immediately apparent how her new body of work shows the same pre-occupations, the same sense of displacement. The differences are obvious: there is no sign of a balikbayan box; in only two of the twenty paintings does she return to images of the painting filled rooms of the Hidalgo ancestral house.

She calls these paintings “abstract”. Technically speaking, they are not abstract, but are instead abstracted from actual images or surfaces. They do not aspire to the purity, grandeur and high ideals of abstract painters such as Kandinsky or Barnett Newman. Her works always refer to things of this material world: small, fragile, damaged and repaired objects, or fabrics.

Also, she calls these paintings “domestic”. Moreover, she has referred to them as “intimate”. We could go further and call them homely, or kitchen paintings. They are of this time: in the lockdown the restaurants and fast-food joints disappear and the kitchen table becomes the centre of many people’s universe. We become very aware of what Norman Bryson in his influential book Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (1990) calls feminine space.

How does this intimacy reveal itself? Her working process, using a laser to burn a digital image on to a surface, seems analytical, impersonal, unemotional. Her subsequent application of paint leaves no trace of gesture, shows no personal “handwriting”. She has talked of making these works with the “cool air of detachment evident in the self-effacing processes of Minimalism.” But yet the paintings seem plaintive to the sensitive viewer.

Talking of his monochrome paintings, the American painter Brice Marden once explained to me that despite the rigour with which they were made the mistakes or imperfections that slipped in were crucial. Paz says something similar: “I allow for imperfections to creep into an otherwise precise technology of reproduction.” In the process approximations, mistakes, unexpected nuances occur. The skill of the artist is in allowing and managing such accidents, such nuances.

In so doing a sensibility seems to slowly appear. Like leaves rustling in the wind, or the murmuring of the ocean. We could say that she allows the world to breath or whisper.  

Tellingly, in a recent interview she talks of the kinship she feels for artists such as Agnes Martin or Doris Salcedo. Subtle artists, where sensibility - and beauty - is revealed through an apparently austere method and a limited choice of materials. Paz belongs that tradition of the understated, the intimate, where the effect depends on the accumulation of small nuances, not grand bravura gestures. One could see Vermeer or Mondrian as being in that tradition, but also many, lesser-known female artists such as Orsola Maddalena Caccia or Louise Moillon, whose works speak of attention and humility, or the Jansenist influenced Philippe de Champaigne and Lubin Bauguin. It is a tradition or undercurrent that also runs through photography, from the early practitioners like Anna Atkins with her delicate photograms and Édouard Baldus with his salt prints and paper negatives to contemporaries such as Dirk Braekman or Craigie Horsfield.

Their affect depends on attentiveness, not shouting, on empathy, not egotism. They are not trying to impress the viewer: they are calling for empathy. Indeed, their work is about empathy, about belonging in the world,

The subjects of these new paintings by Paz are small, damaged and repaired objects: things you can hold in your hand, albeit seen as if darkly through digitalisation. Or fabrics, dematerialised by the scanner then reconstituted in gesso.

This is an archaeology of everyday life. This is a discourse on the humility and complexity of small things and tender surfaces.

Writing in the dying days of August 2021. I see endless images of refugees from Afghanistan, waiting for planes or arriving at airports far away, staring at a new, unfamiliar world. They own nothing now but the clothes they wear and perhaps a bundle of extra clothing. Fabrics are intimate, they still smell of their lost home.

Though our sufferings and the danger we face are so little compared to those attempting to flee Afghanistan, the pandemic has made us all a little like refugees, wary of the public spaces, huddled in the comfort of the kitchen, our hands clutching some familiar object, or more probably, some familiar piece of cloth or clothing. In an age of migration, textiles become our only certain home.

-Tony Godfrey