“I think a vintage canvas brings an incredible amount of value to the artwork that I can never even really fully know," says painter Tal Placido. "I've used linens from the 19th century, so multiple generations of families have had dinner on them. They probably worked for months to even acquire them and that's not even taking into account how they were made—the scale and time required. All of this makes a vintage canvas valuable in a way that a store-bought canvas just isn't."
Opening tomorrow is Placido’s first solo exhibition (Sept 12-Oct 12) at NYC's Art Gotham in East Village, Actor Agent Author. Placdio, a Fillipino-American who never set out to be an artist ("creative things is not typically what Filipinos really want for their children"), studied marketing before moving to New York to pursue a career in music. While taking gigs and busking on the subway, Placido was moonlighting as a freelancer designer for the GAP. She then took up a full-time role designing for Jimmy’Z (the Malibu skater-surfer label before the company shuttered and relaunched). There, Placido says she learned a lot about design, color, and concept and working with fabrics. Trio Canvas Wall Art
Fast forward to the pandemic and Placido, like many others, has relocated from New York City to Central New York after buying a home. “I wanted large-scale art on the walls, but I certainly didn't have the budget, so trying to be resourceful, I grabbed whatever I could paint on—a hardware storage drop cloth and wrapped it around a frame I made from some wood that I found in my garage,” she says. “I just started painting, and it really just kind of lit up my brain.”
Placido then started to rummage through her other belongings, her collection of tablecloths picked up at estate and rummage sales. “I had like this tub of linens that I had picked up—it would've taken me forever to go through all of them, launder and iron it all, so it just sat in my attic for a while…as soon as I painted on a table tablecloth, I was obsessed."
The artist cites both the symbolism and the fabric’s material composition as appealing to her. Her works are softly abstract; powdery colors form cloud-like shapes that might be superimposed with free-handed linear strokes in acrylic, gouache, oil stick, oil pastels, and graphite. Given the scale of the cloths, woven to drape over tables, the scale of her works is similarly outsized.
Without an agenda of what she’s applying to each tablecloth, Placido says she approaches each work without preconceptions. She's in response mode while in her studio, listening to music and selecting her collected cloths, which can date back 100 years or ten, and are mostly light-colored blends of linen. “What I love about the tablecloths is that there's already something there. It's not as intimidating as a blank white canvas.”
Placido’s showcase is named after personality scientist Dr. Dan P. McAdams’s theory that the human psyche is formed and motivated by a trio of elements: the actor (one's social roles), the agent (one's values), the author (one's life experiences). Her work, in turn, is focused on how we see ourselves and craft our life stories. The past lives of her textiles—their original owners—aren’t glossed over with her artist’s hand but rather made into something anew.
“There's this one 12-foot painting in the show and that I intentionally didn't fully paint over, because you could see the roses in the background.” she says, “I'm in love with it. I don't know why people don't do this more.”
Tal Placido | Actor Agent Author opens today at Art Gotham in New York City.
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