I recently visited Action/Abstraction. It was inspiring. If you like abstract painting I highly recommend seeing this exhibition. Five painters are represented: Jo Davenport, Sally Gabori, Todd Hunter, Ildiko Kovacs, and Aida Tomescu. Let’s start with Aida Tomescu, a painter I’m growing to love more and more. Tomescu layers paint, scrapes back, drips and splatters, draws into the work, and adds more layers. Her paintings have a strong physical presence and are bold, complex, and beautiful.
Tomescu was a finalist in the Wynne Prize 2012 with Crossgrain.
What I wanted to get to was a unified presence, full and ordered with a light and clarity of its own.
Intensively worked, scraped back repeatedly, and reconsidered, Crossgrain is not a painting about texture. Nor is the image trying to create a special illusion of a representative world – though if you want to think in terms of earth, air, the soft steps of the sky, it is all of those things.
I think of Crossgrain more as a space where mood, movement, vibration, the linkages of marks across the surface and their special behaviour form a particular experience.
(from her artist statement)
The exhibition runs until 24 March.
Aida Tomescu, Aspen, 2010
Aida Tomescu, Tethys II, 2010
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