Aida Tomescu

Into a carpet made of water

Flowers Gallery is delighted to announce representation of Aida Tomescu, one of Australia's leading contemporary artists, with her first solo exhibition in Hong Kong.

Into a carpet made of water takes its title from an early book of poems Under The Iron of the Moon by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, whose work traverses themes of nature, mortality, and faith.

Tomescu's distinctive and powerful paintings are the result of what she describes as a poetic process of repeated layering, erasure, and a relentless questioning of the image to discover and locate new content within each series. As Deborah Hart, senior curator at the National Gallery of Australia has written, "In Tomescu’s mature paintings the sheer physicality of paint, its density and the archaeology of the layers, its application and movement across the surface, is inseparable from the content. The tenor of the work is guided by its colouration and by its internal rhythms, like the variations and tonalities in music."

The keynote of this exhibition is established by a group of large paintings completed between 2019 and 2021. In these works, there is a higher level of intensity and nuance, a greater subtlety in the way layers are revealed, and it is also clear to see the way in which drawing has increasingly entered into the paintings. Characterised by the use of cadmium red, alizarin crimson, magenta, cobalt violet, and cadmium maroon, they create a wild and often whimsically playful counterpoint to an accompanying series of becalmed, reflective smaller paintings titled Silverpoint I-IV.

Tomescu says: "The simultaneity of presence and absence, the open passages and the exposed areas of linen are crucial to the realisation of the work and an integral part of its structure. The paint incidents, the drips and the splatters that survive, actively participate in creating transitions and ultimately the live unity in the painting. I paint to find the fullness of transitions and of the spaces in-between."

Tomescu's work is informed by an in-depth knowledge and intimate study of art history. She continues to explore the way Pre, Early and Renaissance Italian painters (in particular, Giotto, Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca and Titian) constructed their paintings, and the rich content of their work.

Structure and content are critical components of Tomescu's paintings, which often have long gestation periods, taking months and occasionally years to complete. She says: "My interest has always been to arrive at a unified image with fullness and clarity, to condense from a succession of moments and a continuous correspondence between layers, a truer more essential character of the image. In the midst of doing the work, when things are going well, you often feel that you are drawing on the sum of many experiences that are somehow essentially related. In other circumstances, all those experiences might seem very disparate, yet in the realm of the work they come together into complete accord."