Aida Tomescu: Paintings And Drawings

Dates & times

Thu 1 October — Sun 8 November 2009

 

Over the last ten years the character of Aida Tomescu’s paintings has grown to resemble the freshness, attack and open forms of her drawings.  This exhibition follows the development of Tomescu’s work bringing together a coherent series from the last decade in which unexpected relationships occur across a variety of media.  The fascinating aspect of this particular show is that it gives the viewer an opportunity to see Aida Tomescu’s explorations as they unfold through painting as a gradual construction towards a state of stillness, with its density and the artist’s desire to transform it into an illusion of radiance; and the mixed media work with its eruptive energy and transparency. For Tomescu, drawing and painting are both journeys through layers. Her paintings are intensively worked, scrapped back repeatedly and re-configured, looking for something that is unified, full and ordered. Although profoundly abstract, her work is imbued with fragments of lost languages, not just verbal, but also signs, graffiti, and jotted and scrawled notations from disparate language systems from which an independent identity arises.  Tomescu’s work comes from the history of painting and drawing which obviously involves the development of abstraction. Her paintings always retain the tracks of process, but there is a point when the work achieves a hard-won inevitability.

Image: Aida Tomescu studio view, photo: Jenni Carter.

 

Updated:  16 February 2013/ Responsible Officer:  DHG Director/ Page Contact:  Drill Hall Gallery