AIDA TOMESCU in the midst of happening
Aida Tomescu’s first Australian studio was the linoleum covered kitchen floor of her Kings Cross flat, secured days after arriving in the country from communist Romania in 1980. She chose the flat for its large kitchen which covered half of the overall floor plan, allowing her to immediately set to work, using whatever art materials she could readily access. Tomescu had arrived in Australia knowing no one, and with the understanding that on leaving Romania she could not easily return. At this transitional moment, her belief in painting drove her forward with unwavering commitment and courage.
In the decades since settling in Australia, Tomescu has developed cycles of observational and material investigation within her practice. She undertakes essential periods of research which serve to deeply replenish the well from which future series will draw. Poetry and literature have long informed Tomescu’s work, providing impetus and ongoing reference points (the work of Thomas Bernhard and Luis Borges are significant examples). For some time, her research has included travel through Europe in which every possible day is utilised for deep looking within museums and churches, often studying the same painting for days at a time. From Byzantine mosaics, early Renaissance painting, to Chardin’s still lifes, Tomescu’s intimate study of art inspires reflection and “confirms painting’s capacity to hold more than its subject”.¹ While the objects of her attention are most commonly figurative works, for Tomescu, distinctions between figuration and abstraction are quite irrelevant.
There is something infinitely subtle in the face of their work, a sense of pause, of suspension of time, a sense of continuity, renewing my experience every time. An enduring fragile structure hovers in front of a narrative; its logic is not representational. Everything within the painting relates and connects to everything else. Attentiveness to Giotto, to Titian, is learning . . . I keep learning a pictorial language.
Once returning to her studio, drawing often provides the first step toward a new body of work, evolving into intense creative periods of painting each day until after sunset. This includes travelling by train to and from her studio which provides opportunities for reading, thinking and observation.
From the early stages of her studio practice, collage and print have enabled significant shifts in Tomescu’s work and provide a bridge between drawing and painting. In this exhibition, we bring together all these mediums, exposing the depth of her material and conceptual process. Also included are scrapers, brushes, paint tins and other ephemera from her studio where dense layers of paint are applied and removed, again and again (at times there is more paint on the floor than the canvas). Tomescu knows the work is complete when a unique and compelling form emerges: “Gradually form imposes itself decisively on the work . . . deep into its bones”. She once described working on a series of paintings for an entire year and ending with only four finished works. But nothing is lost in these periods of fluctuating productivity, each new body of work sits upon the foundation of those which came before. Tomescu is never reticent in her use of paint; there can be no restriction if the work’s true form is to be found. Oil is her medium of choice due to its endless ability to transform and reform. The integrity of this medium allows layers to remain stable, granular textural qualities to form and new (or ‘found’) colours to emerge. She says “At no stage does oil paint give up . . . it persists. I can draw deep into the paint, go back into the ground, all the way into the layers of the work. This keeps me connected to the painting’s history”.² In describing this action of layering and penetrating into paint, Tomescu reveals the connections to her drawing, etching and collage techniques.
Tomescu holds a profound awareness of how her work functions, and the performance of her role within the complex dance of their making. For Tomescu, painting is not about surface, texture or colour, though her works demonstrate sophisticated and complex mastery of all these elements. It is rather an act of discovery; a progressive unveiling.
My interest has always been to arrive at a unified image with fullness and clarity, to find a reality which affirms its own existence. There is a silent moment in painting when we experience an absolute, total intelligence in the work through which everything comes together. The logic that develops is stronger than any emotion. The painting begins to project back and I become aware of another presence; the subtle, vulnerable structure built from paint.³
Aida Tomescu, Ithaca I, 1997, etching and drypoint, 49.7 × 39.8 cm (image). Curtin University Art Collection. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Aida
2024.
of the
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There are occasions where we encounter art in a way that speaks to us beyond thought, seeming to simultaneously recognise ourselves, and our connection to something immense and boundless. The depth of Tomescu’s evolving process – from deep looking, reading and thinking, to extended material investigation, brings forth objects that contain a vast embodied knowledge. This ‘intelligence’, as Tomescu describes it, produces an active quality to the works; we encounter them as a state of being ‘in the midst of happening’. Standing before these works is deeply moving as we feel this echo or vibration and respond in kind. For a moment we are embraced in a field of alert stillness.
Lia McKnight Curator, John Curtin Gallery
¹ Unless otherwise specified all quotes from Aida Tomescu are taken from email correspondence, 2024 ² Amber Cresswell Bell, 2023, Australian Abstract, Melbourne: Thames & Hudson Australia Pty Ltd, p 235 ³ Retrieved 7/02/2019 from: https://aidatomescu.com
Born in Bucharest, Romania (1955), Aida Tomescu has been living and working in Sydney since 1980. Tomescu is the winner of the Sulman Prize (1996), the Wynne prize (2001) and the Dobell Prize for Drawing (2003), Art Gallery of New South Wales. She is also the winner of the inaugural LFSA Arts 21 Fellowship (1996) at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne. Tomescu is represented in all major art museums in Australia and in international collections including the Curtin University Art Collection; the National Gallery of Australia; the National Gallery of Victoria; the Art Gallery of New South Wales; the Art Gallery of South Australia; Queensland Art Gallery; Heide Museum of Modern Art; Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand; and the British Museum, London, UK.
This publication supports the exhibition Aida Tomescu: in the midst of happening 25 October - 15 December 2024 Text copyright ©Lia McKnight, 2024. The John Curtin Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of The Navigators Circle
Tomescu,
Courtesy
artist
Fox Jensen Gallery. Photo by Jenni Carter.
JOHN CURTIN GALLERY
Front: Aida Tomescu, Argint, 2012, mixed media on linen, 183 x 152 cm. Curtin University Art Collection. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Aida Tomescu, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Fox Jensen Gallery. Photo by Sharon Baker.