AIDA TOMESCU
AIDA TOMESCU
ENQUIRE ABOUT THE ARTIST
Like blooms that appear quite startlingly before winter’s end, only to be ravaged by frost and wind and then renewed when the season of their being arrives, Aida Tomescu’s works are in a constant state of becoming. Over the years she has developed her own distinctive, continually evolving visual language, working from one group or ensemble of works to the next…
– Deborah Hart, Senior Curator, National Gallery of Australia
Aida Tomescu is without question one of Australia’s most important painters. She has been the recipient of the Sulman, Wynne and Dobell prizes and had a major survey of her painting at the Drill Hall Gallery in 2009. This survey was accompanied by an important essay by Dr. Deborah Hart of the National Gallery, one that demonstrates a long affinity with and sensitivity to the work.
Whilst Tomescu’s work is made here, its genesis and its manifestation point to a much greater awareness and historical cognizance of traditions in painting that gratefully transcend the claustrophobia of the provincial.
Tomescu herself suggests that Australia afforded her the “space” and distance, even a quality of isolation that she feels is crucial to her work. Though it is the tenacity and independence of spirit in Tomescu that provides the ballast and footing for working in this location whilst letting her neatly side-step the potentially suffocating narratives that can relegate painting to cultural illustration.
FEATURED WORKS
I have spent quite some time with Aida in her studio and one of the first things I am aware of, other than to not find myself leaning too close to a fresh painting, is that they seem to measure her body in a Vitruvian sense.
When Aida shifts one canvas to look at another, she disappears behind the stretcher almost entirely. They appear to measure her “extent”. This relationship to the body is reinforced by the scale and reach of the gesture, all of which are calibrated to a series of sizes that she repeats time and again. Like Agnes Martin’s commitment to certain dimensions, maintaining a consistency across the size of the field allows for less predetermined adventures within its confines.
Watching the development of Aida Tomescu’s work over the years has been a thrilling experience…. one of Australia’s leading painters – in any style.
– John McDonald
Ultimately Tomescu’s work asserts a character that is deeply personal whilst transcending the diaristic confines associated with “expressionist” painting.
Freed from the obligation to instruct the viewer about place, Tomescu is able to give us an experience of painting, of colour, of form, of material and gesture that doesn’t seek to mimic nature – it simply is its own nature. What we see in her work is a visual and conceptual density, one where the legacy of construction holds firm as a new image emerges.
It is true that many viewers find mimicry appealing, given the easy flattery it offers those tempted into believing that recognition equals understanding. However, what we surely want from painting is an experience we can’t uncover elsewhere. When an image is remade in paint we are reminded about the complexities of vision, about the way that it is capable of altering, enhancing and challenging our perceptions, by letting vision be more than an ocular phenomenon.
…Aida Tomescu has revived a full-throated painterly abstraction, where colour and gesture flow through the work…she knits over and under surfaces in which the light and colour seem to be pulsing from within the work, not just laid on top. You feel her presence and her sensibility, moment to moment on the surface, in the painting.”
– Patrick McCaughey, Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters, 2014
In talking with Aida, it is apparent that each work has pictorial responsibilities for her; that these paintings depend on a set of conventions and in a sense orthodoxies, that one might assume, amidst such energy, were dispensed with. My feeling is that in the very best sense of the word, these paintings carry a quiet conservatism. Their efficacy depends on being part of a historical progression, albeit a looping, not linear one. Aida is aware that making paintings in a serious way is a responsibility and an act of resistance. The facile way that so much painting is produced today threatens to erode the position that the best painting can occupy – one alongside philosophy, literature, and music as conduits to an appreciation of what it means to make, to feel, to understand.
EXHIBITIONS
Aida Tomescu (b.1955 Bucharest, Romania) lives and works in Sydney, Australia.
Tomescu graduated with a Diploma in Visual Arts in 1977 from the Institute of Fine Arts, Bucharest and completed postgraduate studies at City Art Institute, Sydney in 1983. She was the recipient of the LFSA Arts 21 Fellowship (1996) from the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne, the Sulman Prize (1996), the Wynne prize (2001) and the Dobell Prize for Drawing (2003) from the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Tomescu’s paintings are included in collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Auckland Art Gallery (NZ) and the British Museum, London.
Tomescu has been showing internationally since 1978 with over 40 solo exhibitions to her name and has been with the gallery since 2016.
Ultimately what Tomescu’s art has shown us is that it can never be pinned down to one thing, that it is about open-ended associations, moving between the tangible and intangible. It is perhaps in giving up the need for tangible certainties in favour of more subtle intimations that this fluid state of becoming is revealed.”
– Deborah Hart
Play Video
Aida Tomescu – extended interview (Talking with Painters podcast)