From Rebecca Gallo…
Romanian-born artist Aida Tomescu has been living in Australia for thirty-five years, over which time she has made her mark as one of this country’s foremost abstract painters. She talks temperature rather than colour, and of the way in which she arrives at it as more chance than intent. Her dense, granular layers of oil paint are compiled and scraped back over time. The end product is always a serendipitous combination of what came before, revealed through series of subsequent actions. Some of the works are violent and hot, others evoke a cooler sense of quiet and repose.
Of her process, Tomescu says, “I paint to break the surface illusion of paint, to find what’s underneath. Form in painting is not an object, not a shape. It is a quality with the power to transform, to change.” Tomescu leaves a trail of breadcrumbs in layers of texture and colour that are rediscovered when she excavates the surface to rediscover where she has been. Every painting, from the bold and complex to the calm and restrained, speaks of a journey of creating, concealing and unmasking, and of bold physicality and action.
November 7 – 28
Sullivan + Strumpf, Zetland
Pic: Aida Tomescu, Eyes in the Heat, 2015, oil on canvas, 183 x 306 cm.
