Between November 23 – 27, 2021, SomoS presents First Contentful Paint, the first solo exhibition by visual artist Leigh Cunningham in Europe, featuring paintings created during her artist residency at SomoS in fall 2021. In her post-internet vignettes, Leigh Cunningham depicts everyday scenes sourced from on- and offline imagery. Skillfully rendered in a blurring oil painting technique, her images take on an intriguing hazy characteristic, their familiarity conveying a sense of universality and communality, albeit hidden in the collective (online) unconscious.

(Scroll horizontally to view the panorama.)

In a term coined by Google, comparing the browser’s empty canvas to a painting in progress, “First Contentful Paint” (FCP) is a page metric and ranking factor that measures “the time from when the page starts loading, to when any part of the page’s content is rendered on the screen.” Faster is, of course, better, and fast is never quite fast enough in this endless clash between bountiful content, technological and technical inadequacy, and human entitlement.

In her paintings, Cunningham references the digital experience, its inherent sense of anticipation, and promise of ongoing progress on multiple levels in “not fully-rendered” blurred imagery, capturing and freezing both the look and psychology of the state of “loading” in a thought-provoking painterly screenshot. In her rich visual approximation of the ghostly aesthetic of loading online images, the state of becoming is deferred and fixated, creating a moment to pause and reflect.

While her canvases evoke the fleeting moment of individual psychological expectancy familiar while using digital tools, transposed to a cultural and societal level, her fixation of an image’s halted visual completion may speak of the pervasive need for instant gratification and unbridled advancement. The result is the visualization of a mental space where presence alternates with absence to eventually offer something more precious than the desired recognition of the ordinary.

Cunningham’s vague vignettes play with the psychological response to the unrecognizable, triggering often involuntary affective reactions. They initially seem based on random images, yet we can suspect their emotional and suggestive potential guides their inclusion. Using a personal archive of photographs, advertisements, collage pieces, and, most importantly, online images as the foundation of her paintings, she aims to extract the emotional core of each source.

Like the blurry details of lived experience, the paintings contain abstract evocations of personal encounters. Their shadowplay, sympathetic colors, and depictions of fleeting moments offer an opportunity for realization. Paradoxically, it is their blurriness that induces a sense of familiarity and recognition in the spectator, the singular becoming universal. Indeed, enlightenment may lie in what we cannot see. As Cunningham states, “My paintings consist of hazy colors bleeding into each other, suggesting that there is no separation from ourselves and our surroundings or other people. These distortions serve to show how our understanding of ourselves dissolves at the edges, an obscurity ultimately revealing something at once beautiful and disturbing.”

Vagueness does not stand alone, however, art-historically. Influenced or assisted by photography, various directions in painting contemplated perception and experimented with blurriness (or what was interpreted as such). This rich tradition includes Gerhard Richter, Francis Bacon, Edvard Munch, William Turner, and impressionist painters Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro.

Whereas the work of painters such as Bacon or Richter are less blurry than Cunningham’s and still feature distinct points of interest, clearly revealing the 2D print origin of their source material and in Richter’s case effectively flattening the painting’s surface, Cunningham’s surfaces recreate the sense of depth that the computer screen lends to an image. The extreme blurriness that almost merges the shapes is programmatic and speaks of the universality of shared experience, Cunningham suggesting that ultimately, “we are not really separated from our environments or other people around us. We’re all sharing the same space, being alive is also being kind of amorphous.”

In this way applying a post-internet update to the conversation about the relation between photography, painting and the digital, Cunningham’s keen attention to the screen-based image and the psychology of its use and consumption lends her work its currency.

In art history, paintings are considered to last forever, similar to the notion of everything staying on the internet eternally. Cunningham’s works refer to this relationship between the digital image and painting, creating a communication between the traditional and the contemporary. First Contentful Paint compares the durability of what lives online and what is created by the human hand, like an oil painting, is given a connecting bridge, inviting reflection and discourse.

Sharing a personal photo online, is never just that. More than simply a shared memory, such innocuous imagery serves as data sources for identification, policing, and surveillance, feeding vast networks of images that are increasingly only seen by machines, with prejudice and injustice built-in from the start. The more we share, the less free we become.

In this increasingly less benign setting, the act of blurring images gains new meaning. Blurring could be seen less as a technical failure or stylistic feature, but rather as an empowering, privacy-protecting act.

One could say that by blurring the images she takes from the internet, Leigh Cunningham’s paintings give us back privacy and agency. Even if the image’s particulars are reduced, the emotional and universal appeal is increased. In this way, in Cunningham’s own artistic image-bank, the everyday becomes iconic, intimacy celebrated but respected.

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About Leigh Cunningham:

New York/ New Jersey-based visual artist Leigh Cunningham (1991) graduated with honors at Parsons New School of Design in New York in 2013. She had her first solo exhibition in 2014, Faces Revealed, at the Cowwarr Art Space, in Victoria, Australia. Her work has been presented in the U.S.A. and Philippines; most recently in 2018, in her last exhibition, Melted City 4.3 at Yui Gallery, NYC. In 2013, her illustrations were selected by The American Illustration 32 and The American Illustration Web Archive; in 2010 she won the Bologna Children’s Book Fair Award.

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First Contentful Paint – Solo exhibition by Leigh Cunningham
November 23^rd-27^th, 2021, Tuesday – Saturday, 14 – 19 h
SomoS, Kottbusser Damm 95, 1.0G, 10967 Berlin (U8 – Schönleinstraße)
Entry, as always free.
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