Painting

A view of small things

She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond outside the entrance-gates.
There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.
Vasso Triga’s instinctual and insightful painting, painstakingly worked with paintbrushes and palette knives, which furrow her canvas tirelessly, creating a visual result that operates in absolute freedom, sweeps the viewer up in an expressionist universe with explosive natural colours and varied primordial textures; an organic, tangible, almost pulsing universe, alternately soaring above and sinking into its own basic raw materials.

In amongst the adventurous blues and the verdant green clearings of the kitchen gardens; behind the dense summer yellows of the cultivated fi elds and the bright reds of the rose gardens and the untouched coral reefs of a tropical archipelago; near the hovering aura of lambent memories of Chagall and Matisse, Triga introduces us to a new, miniature geography of the world, an unexplored place of miracles with its riotous vegetation, where the slightest nuances of shade and the lightest rustle suddenly gain an expanded meaning.

Setting aside any previous accord of sight, the idea of an open “window on the world”, which constituted the conceptual axis as well as the perspective of her previous oeuvre, but maintaining the imperative necessity of freedom of expression, which we have encountered in previous chapters of her work, Vasso Triga conceives of a new and exceptionally eloquent game for viewing things, a novel emotional and conceptual compact, where the “inside” of the “self” permeates and acts with the “outside” of the other: in the artist’s gaze and intellect, even when it remains unseen, there is always a Secret Rear Garden, a small organic refuge for untamed gestural brushstrokes,for rhythmic arches and curves, for lights and shadows, for transparencies and densities, for its secret fruit, its roots and braided tendrils, for its abstract organic forms with their tangible quality.

In the Secret Rear Garden of the artist’s mind, the hours and days gently succeed one another. The titles are eloquent and symbolise as a unit the discourse between the perpetu l and the ephemeral: white, undelivered envelopes hidden in the sand and amongst the tender chamomile; journals of unique instants and cyclical repetition; the seeds are sown, the plants bloom - the little deaths and new births that stir the sleep of the earth; the blooming walls that call upon the viewer to guess what lies hidden beyond them; the watery fountains, that hint of cleansing; low fl ights over blooming meadows; and dives into water abyssals with mysterious underwater gardens.

In this conceived and fertile place, with its unrestricted view, Vasso Triga yet again shapes and illustrates her thoughts impulsively, stopping “each time where my indefi nable yet nevertheless present sense of the piece is satisfi ed, where I feel its gesturally and emotionally loaded feel and its intravenous cadence”. The artist’s boundless freedom, which simultaneously calls one to daydream and to attempt to interpret, here appears to concern the viewer equally: the perpetual dissolution of malleable boundaries proposes countless possibilities for wandering, both through the image itself and through its visible symbols, affi rming and articulately redefi ning the very essence of the act of painting.

And finally, the fi nal work in the exhibition, with the “kiosk” of ephemeral news conceived by the painter, as well as the Thinker, the sole human fi gure, which accompanies the chapter Théa - View with its symbolic displacement, condenses all the progress in Vasso Triga’s painting - the quest for self-knowledge and the solutions found: in the cutting edge of gaze and memory, the ephemeral quality of news is transformed into perpetual experience and the perpetuity of thought becomes an immaterial yet almost palpable companion.