儂那·凱西亞

The work is in good condition overall as viewed. Unframed, on a stretcher.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Throughout her career as a painter, Nona Garcia has shown an unsurpassed ability to spot latent poetry in unsuspecting landscapes. She possesses the eye of a surveyor, combined with the purpose of a wanderer. She sees through fields and mountains and abandoned shacks, and continues to find the hidden reality among them, waiting to be acquired through painting.  

In her work, Untitled Lot 271, she paints a vacant field off a remote path from the mountainside. The grass has unevenly grown, and is looking damp under a hazy skyline. At the center is a defaced billboard, showing its armature like a skeleton with its flesh ripped off. The outer layer, its borders—or what’s left of it—envelopes the frame—the margins of a torn banner with piecemeal portions that provide for us clues of what was once there: a tarpaulin that advertises real estate? The tattered corner that reads, ‘over 100 lots for resale,’ becomes the only signifier to an unknowable content.

The scene passes off as an idyllic picture—lush, tranquil, and sublime. It serves as a reference to the ‘pastoral’ category, to which many genre painters have resorted to, celebrating the countryside and the harmonies between man and nature. But in Nona Garcia’s scheme, the pastoral becomes progressive, the idyllic becomes ominous. It has become laden with contradictions, as a mark of the complexities of contemporary living; and of new strategies in contemporary art.

The composition exposes the volatility of ecological balance, with its susceptibility to the desire of settlers to possess them. It is a statement on the proclivities of acquiring land. But its true sentiments ring out from the negated conditions of the scene: the desirable aspect has been erased when the message on the billboard becomes suddenly absent. There comes a notion that all that is bright and desirable about this site has been lost together with the mutilation of the banner, but in essence it reveals something—the true view, the land that lurks behind the ideal representation is the real condition of things. Through the mutilated sign, we can suddenly see. Through this single, unexpected anomaly, real estate suddenly translates to the real state of things.

To this effect, the painting becomes a meditation on hidden messages, on its ambiguity—on how the obliteration of the purported message can reveal another essential message. The composition is downright poignant, as it establishes a frame within a frame—occurring when the damaged billboard becomes a window into another view. But furthermore, with Nona Garcia’s proven intuitiveness in the portrayal of things that are absent, or of thriving presences in desolated spaces, or of inadvertent magnificence in humdrum settings, this place—this piece of land that appears to have been forsaken from its unfulfilled promise—becomes a revelation, of things that are gone and of things that are about to come: It expresses devaluation, stemming from the image of a discarded project, the eradication of possible narratives and opportunities. Yet, it also conveys deliverance, of returning a nearly disappearing panorama back to its pristine, unadulterated view.