Shashou’s abstract paintings take their queue from the surfaces first explored in the skin of her portrait subjects, but open up a new terrain for the artist. Here the accumulation of marks, cuts, tears and splinters build up a surface full of character, and yet are resolutely without a subject – these are not portraits, but, rather, emotional landscapes that confront our physicality by embracing the potential for flaws, errors, and fragmentation; the surfaces speak of a more subjective content.
Shashou says: ‘I am interested in layering symbols of life’s varying experiences; and expressing its underlying vulnerability. The cutting through the stretcher and canvas, distressing it, was a natural progression of the work’.
It does not shock the viewer to see a chainsaw has gone right through the finished painting. ‘Beauty matters to me, but not in a traditional way’. This still risqué gesture of cutting into the canvas might be read as a vandalous act, yet as Fontana – that most famous of ripper artists – explained, the cutting action is not destructive but constructive, and through this motion the painting-object is created.
While, like Fontana, describing her activity as performative, Shashou by contrast sutures sections of the torn material together, adds further areas of paint, creating highly worked and sculptural pieces. Her almost ritual actions over time present thought-provoking palimpsest, or as Shashou puts it ‘provocative, narrative making traces’.
