Painting

About Vasso Triga’s Painting
Iris Criticou, Art Historian


"Real Painting ceaselessly searches to find a new path through the labyrinth of words, towards the complex yet unutterable delights of viewing".

Julian Bell

Vasso Triga’s adventure in the kingdom of colour, which commenced many years ago as a delicate private path, continues with unabated dedication to this day, and she sweeps us along with ardent certainty in the process of her personal view of the world and how things are: guided by her ever-present initial notes, worked in a variety of visual media (charcoal, drawing, collage with china ink, watercolours and printers’ ink) and subsequently enlisting her eloquent use of colour as a visualised independent medium in and of itself, Triga utilises free expression to put forward the daring colour fields that run through her current paintings, gifting an harmonic, rapid rhythm to her raw materials. Her work vibrates with consecutive explosions of lively colours, successive daring graphics and fluid, expressionistic volumes; seeking to imprint all that which our senses can potentially see or hear and comprehend, it is drawn from a concentration of images of the warm Greek landscape, which continues to dominate as the painter’s source of inspiration.

An orgy of spring vegetation; summer wheat fields; forests of tall cypresses and centuries-old olive groves; the life-giving sea with its unexpected tints and the indelible traces of ships plotting endless voyages; the triumphal sunsets and asymmetrical rocks of the Greek islands; the walkers, the harvesters, and the couples in love that are inked in with rapidly drawn lines on the edges of the dense chromatic structural matter, maintaining an elliptical transparency that references Chagall’s dreamscape figures, gradually transformed through Vasso Triga’s gestural painting and passionate paintbrush, into abstract organic forms with an admirably tactile quality which, maintaining a sublime purity of colour and creativity, settle on the canvas and progress into a qualitative, emotive transcription of reality.

In the process of creating these dense friezes and lambent interlocking braids, these fertile plains that are explored by latent human figures that are sometimes visible and at other times unseen, the painter mainly uses an entirely spontaneous style of painting: avoiding the process of preliminary drawings and following the dominant instinct put forth by each new idea, Vasso Triga shapes and illustrates her thoughts impulsively, stopping "where in each instance she is satisfied by an indefinable but nevertheless present sense of the work", its emotionally laden field and its innate musicality. During the composition of the painting, whose foundations lay equally in observation and intuition, small independent islands of colour are created: organic units of colour and sources of light, which never arise in only singular isolated points on the canvas: using as her starting point a process that at first look appears to be abstractive, the painter’s flowing chromatic choreographies, painstakingly and consecutively worked with paintbrush and palette knife, which tirelessly plough through the canvas, lead through some unforced process into formulated, let recognisable free creative and geometric forms that converse with the dominant colour.

Brought forth through ample greens, pointed summery yellows, lively dots of a reddish magenta, occasionally well-placed black and white (that in turn become colours) and mainly in the dream-laden cobalt blues of Matisse, the painter’s favourite artist and source of inspiration, Vasso Triga’s current themes lie along two basic avenues: even though the liberal process of organic "internal expression" is characteristic of several of her works, constituting an end in itself for these pieces, the painter’s need to express her anguish for the vulnerable human environment, constitutes the cause for the creation of a second major portion of the works in this group: "Being able to touch a flower means something in my day-to-day life. Because I care deeply for the environment, I wanted my paintings to be a window onto nature, to offer something that is missing. I wanted you to be able to ‘open them’, to see them and get a breath of fresh air...", she notes about her work. Studying the painter’s parallel work in Luxembourg and Greece, gazing on expressionistic forests of the imagination that meet and merge with real memories, experiences and records of reality ("in Luxembourg, staying in an attic, which serves as an excellent frame for the city’s green space, I saw, for the first time in nature, trees which I had already drawn in Greece", the painter noted during our conversation), what dominates is an overwhelming sense of optimism and unbounded freedom, which, besides the artist herself, also involves the viewer: an unstudied style and a supple dream element, provide the margins for the image to travel beyond its own boundaries, to be placed precisely where each of us desires, to be interpreted through a process of innumerable possibilities, confirming the very essence of the act of painting.

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"Where your glance'falls' upon some lucky instant,
it may give you peace of mind for an entire day.
You don’t always need luggage in order to 'travel'!"

V. Triga