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Oolong Gallery is pleased to present Tea-soaked madeleine, a solo exhibition of paintings by Michael Colletta.
“Michael Colletta’s paintings are rooted in the ordinary events that accumulate into a life: gatherings of family, childhood play on suburban streets, garage-band concerts, the watering of plants, the umbrellaing of a beloved, and the solace of remembered places. Echoing the exhibition’s title, Tea-soaked Madeleine, these works arise from a mysterious transformation of memory into universally intimate micro-monuments. Working from memory and invention as much as observation, Colletta pares away incidental detail to arrive at images that feel at once personal and archetypal. His recurring figures and motifs function less as portraits of specific individuals than as a means to convey affection, longing, wonder, and belonging.
Colletta’s paintings possess a quiet emotional gravity. Their simplified forms, carefully orchestrated color relationships, and luminous spaces create a world where everyday experience takes on an almost mythic dimension. Colletta reminds us that profound meaning is often found not in extraordinary events, but in the moments that linger in memory long after they have passed, acquiring a significance greater than the events themselves.”
—Larry Groff
Marcel Proust viewed involuntary memory as containing the “essence of the past,” something unavailable to voluntary recollection. In In Search of Lost Time, the taste of a madeleine soaked in tea restores to the narrator a long-forgotten childhood memory of eating the same cake with his aunt. One memory opens into another: the house returns, and then the town. Sensation becomes a passage through time. Proust called these sudden, unbidden recoveries “involuntary memories.”
The exhibition title points to the way memory operates in Colletta’s studio. His paintings do not attempt to illustrate the past or fix it in place. A woman putting down her towel at the beach, his daughter watering her garden, his wife taking a sip of wine, or the memory of his brother playing guitar can provide a beginning. What follows is less an act of transcription than a negotiation between an image or idea held in the mind and a painted surface.
Colletta begins with drawing, often without direct observation. Multiple sketches allow composition, light, and form to shift. When a passage resists him, he may turn selectively to direct observation. Some drawings become the starting points for paintings; others are put away. A drawing offers a point of departure rather than a set of instructions.
This understanding of painting began early. Colletta grew up in Alhambra, California, where landscapes and ocean scenes painted by his uncle hung in the family home. As a child, he looked closely enough to see individual marks of paint sitting on flat canvas. From several feet away, those same marks became an illusion of three-dimensional space. He began by trying to copy them, hoping to make what he describes as “a window to another place.”
Colletta considers his paintings drawings made with more complicated means. Brush, paint, solvent, rag, and palette knife replace pencil and eraser. Black and white gives way to color and a larger scale. The central activity remains the comparison of one mark with another. He works on one painting at a time, without a predetermined destination, and may spend hours looking before recognizing the next move.
In this interval between looking and acting, memory becomes unstable. The initial image is subjected to scale, color, erasure, revision, and the stubborn materiality of paint. The remembered event recedes even as the painting becomes more present. Colletta does not so much recover a memory as discover what painting can make of its residue.
The process is meditative. Through making, thoughts of past, present, and future begin to overlap. Colletta speaks of the mystery of life and of searching for an understanding beyond the material world. He describes the paintings as “windows or visual daydreams”—attempts to find a place where “space, time, and emotion merge as one.”
Michael Colletta received his MFA from Yale University in 1987, following his BA from UC Santa Cruz. He has more than thirty years of painting experience, working from life as well as the imagination. Colletta has taught studio art at UC Santa Cruz and currently teaches at UC San Diego Extended Studies. His work has been exhibited nationally and is held in numerous private collections. The painter lives and works in Encinitas, California, where Oolong Gallery was founded.
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