‘Ravel’

Aida Tomescu’s paintings and drawings evolve slowly and even though most of the works in this exhibition span only a period of about fifteen months, paintings such as the Bribie series, Rialto and mixed media works on paper started as early as 1997 and travelled with the artist as she moved and changed studios.

All paintings and drawings in this show have been intensively worked, scraped back repeatedly and re-configured, looking for something that is unified, full and ordered. Contrary to the fleeting glance they are not works about texture, nor indeed purely formal qualities of painting. They are more essentially related to the artist’s sense of poetic construction, where mood, movement, vibration, the linkages of brushstrokes across the surface and their special behaviour forms a particular experience.

As Tomescu says:
‘At a certain point a painting is determining itself, its own character,
being attentive and responding to the weaknesses, fragility, absences and flaws preoccupies me entirely.
Ultimately it is as remote as it could be from spontaneity and self-expression.’

The show takes its title from the first drawing Ravel; not only sharing its name with a famous composer, it is the opposite of ‘unravel’.

Over the last three or four years the character of Tomescu’s large paintings has grown to resemble the freshness, attack and open forms of her drawings.

The current exhibition started with the mixed media works and moved across the larger canvases. Aqua alta, Spuren and Berg in particular reached their identities after months of gestation and paintings such as Kansas, Blue eye and Juno bring together the closest relationship between paintings and drawings of any Tomescu exhibition so far. Each image here displays its own distinct character but at the same time flows readily into its companions, achieving great cohesiveness and an entirely unified series.

The title of each painting has been carefully thought through but never obtrudes on the immediacy and the field of energy Tomescu has endeavoured to articulate. Each in some way echoes a textual reference evoked by the calligraphy contained within the general visual character of its image:

‘I like titles that wander between various language systems and could
mean different things; titles that harmonise with the general visual character of the works, but remain open, elusive and multiple.’

Tomescu sees herself following the work as is travels the distance towards a new identity; ‘unfixing’ forms as it were, so that they might be allowed to expand.

‘But paradoxically the more open a painting becomes, the more precise it also begins to feel. Ultimately, I believe that in spite of the force of the colour, it is the subtlety, the search for precise weighting and nuance which holds the painting together.’

Born in Bucharest, Romania, Tomescu has lived and worked in Australia since 1980. She was the inaugural winner of the prestigious LSFA Arts 21 Fellowship in 1996. Subsequent winners of the LSFA award have included Imants Tillers, Mike Parr, Akio Makigawa and Fiona Hall. Aida was the winner of the Wynne Prize in 2001, and in 2003 she won the Dobell Prize for Drawing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Her work has been collected by many important public and private collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Museum of Modern Art at Heide and the National Museum, Bucharest.