AIDA TOMESCU: MESSIAEN

I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colours for those who see none.     Olivier Messiaen

Olivier Messiaen was Professor of Harmony at the Paris Conservatoire. This sounds as much a diplomatic post rather than one devoted solely to music. Perhaps it is indeed the case, that musical composition depends on relationships and on the negotiation of space and time.  That some form of rapprochement between factions is needed to co-exist is also a demand made of painting. Unfortunately, one sees entirely too much easing of tensions – but not in Tomescu.

The new paintings of Aida Tomescu take many of their titles from the composer Messiaen and whilst she is appropriately reluctant to see her works as anything other than the resolution of their own demands and desires, the ecumenical approach that Messiaen took to music, from cultures outside of the western canon – Hindu rhythms and Japanese music for example, demonstrate something that is fundamental to Tomescu’s mature painting. 

More than ever before Tomescu’s paintings reject the monotheism and orthodoxies of the western canon – less so the art history that has always been the foundation of her passion and shapes an essential understanding of painting, but her increasing use of colour as a profound structural element, something Messiaen would’ve assented to, and critically the relationships that exist between time and music, between time and painting and between colour and sound.

The chromesthesia that Messiaen embraced – seeing colour as chords and vice versa is something that one might easily ascribe or rather adopt in looking at Tomescu’s increasingly symphonic works. For these are paintings where pitch and crescendo, silence and transition work, as Messiaen would’ve wanted, in harmony. 

The installation of Messiaen in the new FOX JENSEN/SYDNEY will allow for the presentation of Tomescu’s work with appropriate scale and generosity. Each panel that Tomescu paints is made at full reach. This calibration to body feels crucial to the works capacity to invite attention through sensation as much as through cognition. 

The presentation of each panel as an open field where the body of the pigment, in concert with the of constructive strokes, promotes colour itself as a structuring element – one that opens the space, granting access to both a concrete and a metaphorical architecture where one experiences their rhythms, transitions and intricacies. 

As diptychs and triptychs, the physical extent of the paintings becomes truly panoramic and the invitation they extend to move along their full breadth gives these paintings an amplitude and volume that is heightened even further.

New colours – yellow and violet, orange and luminous whites invest the paintings with an incandescence and celebration that mark her most compelling works.

Fox Jensen Sydney is thrilled to be presenting Messiaen, Tomescu’s fifth solo exhibition with the galleries.