Paz’s work is more sober. The palm tree is not for her just a slightly ludicrous signifier for the Tropics. Her work has always been about taking old images and revivifying them, making them new again. Her transformations are discreet, subtle but effective.

The photos she uses are of the palm trees or coconut groves near the old family house where she lives – a settlement around a golf course, now less smart than when first laid out – a place with something of an air of dilapidation and distressed gentility – a country club atmosphere. During the Pandemic she would often walk amongst them. She says these palm trees she lived amongst made her think of ghost stories.

The photographs she took of them then are the basis for these paintings.

She sketches the composition – drawing has in recent years become an important part of her process. Translated by the laser they become pixelated, degraded, or essentialised images. These she doctors further on Photoshop, using “magic wand” especially, to tidy things up, to get rid of foreground detail, etc. She has to work on small pieces or fragments because her studio is so small – but she turns this to her advantage.

These multi-panel works remind me of one of the transitional phases in Piet Mondrian’s progression from figuration to abstraction – those paintings made in 1917 of colour squares jostllng for position on the canvas. He was responding to how Bart van Leck had been placing colour squares on a wall. 3 Paz’s paintings though have none of the idealism of Mondrian or Van Leck.

Everything is provisional here. As always, these images of Paz are so very in between. It is an unstable grid, but calm, the squares jostle with hesitation, not with anger. They are reticent works, as are Matisse’s Niçois paintings, her palm trees are frozen in motion, all stilled, just as, for all the pianos and guitars he includes, Matisse’s domestic scenes remain mute. 

Her colouring is intuitive – she has been affected and made more comfortable with colour by a break in the USA making and glazing ceramics. She applies it with an air brush. She likes the delicacy of that process. These works are of their time, the lockdown, when the restaurants and fast-food joints disappeared and the kitchen table became the centre of many people’s universe. We become more aware of what Norman Bryson in his influential book Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (1990) calls “feminine space”. We could call these works “intimate” or “homely,”or “kitchen paintings”.

How does this intimacy reveal itself? Her working process, using a laser to burn a digital image on to a surface, may seem 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.

And things look different. She is making palm trees new again. Making them visible, and, possibly, beautiful.