Jessica Diamond. Wall Paintings
Date: From 31 March 2011
Exhibition Session: The Political Constitution of the Present

Jessica Diamond (New York, 1957) is known for her ironic and incisive texts directly painted on the wall. This North American artist forged her sensibility during the 80s, a moment in which painting was being questioned. Since then, she maintains a surprising and sincere sense of identity and uses language as the basis for her work, characterized by her critical and satirical attitude towards popular culture symbols. She usually employs mural painting to express herself, a technique that makes her stand outside the art market.

The drawings and text fragments that Jessica Diamond traces on the walls deal with sadness, self-awareness, and the "funny" in tragicomic tone. The artist leaves a memo on the wall, an angry one, in which abandonment and self-protection assert themselves in personal but non-nostalgic, unsentimental codes. Her memo, a quickly written message rooted in the tactics of corporate America, is always a strong, direct statement in which individuality is reconstructed despite the generic qualities of the world we inhabit. To read this work only through the apparatus of advertising slogans, media, and low culture as coercive powers would be a misleadingly direct take denying complexities, subtleties, and contemplative aspects.

In some of her pieces, Diamond deals with the vicissitudes of being a contemporary artist, because she has to make, show and sell her works to survive. She has also expressed in a concise way her point of view about the New York art market: greedy, exploitative and prone to inflation.