One of the strangest and most surreal side effects of the current COVID19 pandemic has been the way in which time has both slowed down and sped up. Many have dubbed it ‘The Great Pause’.

The pandemic hit and suddenly we were collectively forced to slam on the breaks, bringing the frenetic, fast paced world in which many of us exist to a surreal and abrupt halt. Time slowed down. Routines were broken. At first, it felt as though an impossible sequence of enormous calamities was felling us. In the space of days our world seemed to be turned upside down. Sentences we never could have imagined we would utter were suddenly being spoken. Concepts that were completely foreign to us were suddenly a scary new reality. Time seemed to be moving at lightening speed.

By late March 2020, the horrific bush fires of New Years Eve and the sweeping horrors of January felt as though they had happened in another lifetime. By late April, time had slowed down and days were crawling along in an endless blur.

Many people have been busier than ever, struggling to keep up with a changing world. We funnelled our energy into ‘adapting’, ‘pivoting’ and showing ‘resilience’. For some of us it has been a daily fight to keep businesses afloat and our sanity intact. For others time has slowed down to a crawl. Jobs have been lost and an unnerving and anxiety ridden boredom has hung in the air like an endless fog. Days stretched out endlessly.

We talk about how we are all in this together. But our experiences have been vastly different depending on our circumstances. Perhaps the only universal element of our collective experiences has been this strange new experience of time. The way in which it has sped up, with the year rushing past at warp speed, a calamitous blur of headlines and horror. The way it has simultaneously slowed down, our worlds shrinking and time spooling out in front of us in long stretches in a way many of us have not experienced since languorous childhoods.

In making these two new bodies of work during the early months of the pandemic, Douglas Diaz has perfectly captured these experiences of time. Using it as a tool and a medium, Douglas has created a series of ‘Untitled’ works made by slowly and gradually adding a new layer of oil paint to a stretched linen substrate, every day until the tube of paint gradually ran out. On average these works took 45 days to create. Slowly, slowly, slowly. A process in stark and direct contrast to Douglas’ practice prior to the pandemic – when he was known for his meditative but spontaneous and gestural paintings and drawings – all typically made in one sitting. Capturing the endless stretching days that lay before him as he waits out the pandemic in Bali (where he is now unexpectedly living), Diaz’s ‘Untitled’ series is predicated on the slow march of time.

Showing alongside these works is another series of paintings titled ‘UNTIL THE END’. Again, these new works offer a portrait of a brief moment in time. They are a snapshot of a moment in which paint was squeezed from the tube and impulsively and emphatically brought to life through a series of rapid and unexpected gestures.

Seen together, these two contrasting series of works capture an experience of the many ways in which time can be felt. Despite all logic, despite what the clock tells us, despite the forward marching of the calendar, we realise that time is fluid and full of contradictions: it is unrelenting and reliable and yet can feel as slippery as quicksilver.

Rhianna Walcott
Curator (2020)