Ravelle Pillay Paints the Photograph's Decay, Not the Photograph

♦ ♦ ♦ JUNE 09, 2026 | 4 MIN READ Ravelle Pillay Paints the Photograph's Decay, Not the Photograph At a Glance Ravelle Pillay works from old black-and-white photographs, but she doesn't build the image up in paint the way most photo-based painters do. She stains and wipes it back until the paint behaves like a fading print. The method is the meaning. There is a black-and-white snapshot somewhere behind every painting in this show, most of them from albums Ravelle Pillay’s grandmother handed down. You will not find the snapshot when you stand in front of the work. That is the point. In “Revisitations,” at Goodman Gallery in London from June 4 through July 16 and flagged in The Art Newspaper’s London Gallery Weekend critics’ picks on June 4, Pillay (born Durban, 1993) takes a found photograph and, instead of reproducing it, lets paint do to the image what time does to a print. The gallery’s text borrows her own word for the result. The painting s “become ‘portmanteaus’, a linguistic blend of the original image and the uncertain elements conjured through paint: subjective feeling, personal and collective memory and, now, grief.” That is a clean way to say it. But the part I keep reading as a painter is not the concept. It is the hand. Why staining and erasing is the opposite of painting from a photo Most painters working from a photograph build the image up. Block it in, cover the wrong note with a right one, correct opaque over opaque until the picture sits on top of the canvas. Paint forgives that way, because the next layer hides the last. Pillay works the other direction. The description is exact: “through thin layers, erasure and staining, they have a haunting presence.” Staining is not covering. A stain soaks into the weave and cannot be lifted clean, the way a dye takes. So when she describes the work as constant adding and erasure, an excavation where details surface slowly, she is describing a surface that keeps a record of everything taken away. Every wipe leaves a ghost. Nothing is fully hidden, because staining will not let it be. That is hard, and it is deliberate, and here is the thing the concept-language skips: the technique rhymes with the subject. Her source is partly “the material degradation of photographic images over time,” the way an old print yellows, silvers out, loses its edges. A painter building up in opaque layers would have to imitate that decay from the outside, paint a picture of a faded photo. Pillay instead makes her paint fade from the inside, by the same logic of loss, thin and stained and rubbed back. She isn’t painting a faded photograph. She’s making the paint fade. What inventing colour over a black-and-white source actually demands The second decision a painter notices is colour, because the source has none. Starting from black and white, every hue is invented. There is no correct green to check against, no skin tone the photograph can confirm. That sounds like freedom. It is mostly a discipline problem, becau