Kristin Texeira’s abstract paintings recall the essence of moments through colour

Kristin Texeira’s abstract paintings pay “homage to the past”, by recalling the “essence of moments through colour”. Kristin paints to remember; she wants to “provide proof — for myself and others — of existing in certain moments in time”. “Without art, I don’t know how else you would hold onto memories”, the artist tells It’s Nice That, and it’s through painting that she keeps her past alive.

Kristin uses colour to relay a memory or feeling; colour is what the artist sees when she “hears music, tastes wine and interacts with others”— it is how she “deciphers new places when travelling”. Kristin blends and juxtaposes beautiful, bold blocks of colour to create “memory maps”. Your memory is fleeting – “it changes each time we recall the moment” – and thus, is abstract. The mesmerising, harmonious paintings that Kristin creates are representative of this; she picks a previous time or place and “investigates it thoroughly until [she] feels she’s rendered the essence”. One series by her, is based on “every window [she] could remember having looked out”, and she’s painted “the colours that came to [her] mind when remembering everyone from four years of schooling at MassArt”. “Memory maps are like colour timelines or windows to jump into to revisit the past”, Kristin explains; they are symbolic representations of moments.

The forms and shapes she creates are familiar, yet “elusive and intangible”; they are as ambiguous as one’s memories. Kristin tells us, “this vagueness is complemented by specifics in [her] writing, which — while focusing on a moment’s singular identity and tender details — leaves much to the viewers’ interpretation”. She carries a sketchbook around constantly, to document her day to day, “gathering conversations, sounds or hand-writing combinations that she wants to mix up back at the studio”. Kristin works from out of an old letterpress print shop, surrounded by “printing presses and drawers upon drawers of type”. The beauty of the everyday inspires her work, the longing to cling to the present moment and to render it always within the mind. She “collects scraps of paper, small pressed-flowers, any item that might contain the memory of a moment”, desperate not to lose a second and to stamp it as a permanent imprint.