S T A T E   O F   P L A Y

TF Gallery, Dallas
Opening Night Oct 16th, 2025 - Jan, 16th 

This show has been a year in the making, 14 months to be exact, from when Tanner Ewing and Josh Papa first met to discuss State of Play.

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For his latest body of work, Papa has embraced a stream-of-consciousness approach, moving instinctively from thought to canvas. The results are layered, unfiltered, and unmistakably of the moment.

His paintings absorb the anxieties and urgencies of 2025—conflict, politics, migration, the race to Mars—while simultaneously tracing the more intimate happy rhythms of daily life. What emerges is a practice balanced on the knife-edge between turbulence and joy. Papa’s canvases toggle between melancholy and levity, between chaos and order, between the heaviness of world events and the buoyancy of spontaneous doodles or bursts of colour. That ambiguity is the point. Each painting invites the viewer to ask, Am I looking at serenity or discord?

The answer, inevitably, is subjective, dependent as much on the audience’s state of mind as on the imagery itself. Deliberately open-ended, the exhibition resists fixed narrative. Instead, it becomes an active space for projection and interpretation, where playfulness coexists with unease and where meaning is never prescribed.

The largest works on display, ‘Kingdom IIl ’and ‘Painful Bliss ’each took 3-4 months to complete. The earliest work on display, ‘Pond’ is intentionally framed to resemble an old master. Papa took a very classical subject matter and interpreted it in his manner.