Painting

Planting roses
Iris Criticou, Art Historian. May 2011


A true poet never seeks to be poetic.
And a nursery gardener never scents his roses.     

Jean Cocteau

A plant nursery is a place where plants are propagated. Nurseries often cultivate plants in greenhouses or plastic tunnels, designed to protect young plants from inclement weather and particularly frost, while also allowing them access to light and ventilation.  There are retail nurseries that sell to the public, wholesale nurseries which sell only to businesses and to commercial gardeners and private nurseries that supply the needs of institutions or private estates.  Although the popular image of a nursery is that of a supplier of garden plants, the range of nursery functions is far wider than that, and is of vital importance to many branches of agriculture, forestry and conservation biology. Some nurseries specialize in one phase of the process; or in one type of plant (cacti, rock nurseries, orchards and others).

Some produce stock seasonally, ready for springtime exports to colder regions where propagations could not have been started so early. Most nurseries remain highly labour­intensive. Although some processes have been mechanised and automated, others have not. It remains highly unlikely that all plants treated in the same way at the same time will arrive at the same condition together, so plant care requires observation, judgment and manual dexterity.  Business is highly seasonal, concentrated in spring and autumn.  There is no guarantee that there will be demand for the product – this will be affected by temperature, drought cheaper foreign competition, fashion, among other things.

Source: Wikipedia

The previous chapter of Vasso Triga’s work, shown in Luxembourg, was imbued with the element of remembered Greek spirit and also functioned as an ever­changing window onto the outer world of the European city where the painter lives; as well as being a vehicle for acute observation of an incrementally mutating and stricken natural environment.
Gestural expression dominates, and life­giving rhythm and freedom of line, as well as the painter’s turbulent use of her paintbrush, are transformed gradually into abstract organic shapes, with an amazingly tactile quality and countless potential readings, which were metamorphose on canvas into a poetic, emotional and free transposition of reality, which continues to maintain an amazing clarity of colour and sculptural nature.
At times maintaining an elliptic transparency and at other times penetrating into the quintessence of colour; poised between fading memories of Chagal and Matisse’s life­giving spectrum of colours, the latter being the painter’s favourite artist and timeless source of inspiration; Triga’s work investigates summer plains and centuries­old olive groves, sparkling sea vistas and calm summer walkers, using rapidly­drawn lines in a sensual progress of dense painted structured matter and designating a specific contract for fertile viewing of the natural world. 

Commencing the latest chapter of her work, starting off by pursuing a strict bicolour scheme (white ­ blue, white ­ green and so forth), the painter fell under the spell of the painting process itself and was absorbed by it, pleasurably subjugating and transubstantiating the challenge of bitonality, choosing to introduce colour reversals into her work, as well as intense foci of light and organic fields in progress, which swept away the initial compact of the gaze’s imagery and aesthetics.
Through a group of deftly wrought spring and summer images, assisted by eloquent lively blues and lambent yellows, clamouring greens and warm, daring reds, which frequently commence simultaneously from different points in the painting, the artist gradually projects a “nursery” she has devised of fluid painterly compacts, a multi­coloured, spectral field of ideas and experiments, where everything new has the power to act refreshingly.  Treading with knowledge and sensitivity into


13the self­sufficiency of this imaginary nursery, pregnant with thoughts and ideas, new colours and budding stems, outlining sequential ground plans of vernal walled gardens and intoxicating orchards, where human existence can at times be glimpsed (in the graffiti on the garden wall, the shadow of a gardener, the outline of two red garden seats), Triga continues to advocate passionately her expressionistic turn of line, her explosive combinations of colour, her experimental and unpredictable shaping of masses, the compulsive desire to touch: beneath the microscopic mushrooms and the rosy petals of a blossoming cherry tree; between untidy tendrils and fleshy leaves, behind the silvery green mint roses and the dense chamomile lawns, lie birds with blue/brown feathers, stir the horses of the plains the painter has dreamed up.

With that same expansive manner, with which Vasso Triga handles the idea of a plant nursery in her painting: as an open, tender concept of protected manifold collectibility and constant rebirth, the exhibition Art of the Garden (Tate Britain, June – August 2004), investigated the relationship between the concept of a garden and its impact on British art over the past two hundred years, focusing on artists ranging from John Constable to Ian Hamilton Finlay and from Beatrix Potter to Marc Quinn, who overwhelmingly saw the garden as a vital part of everyday life, as a central artery for differing local societies, as a source of endless recreation and relaxation, and further, as an element emblematic of individual and national identity able to house the most dynamic creative impulses. Connecting their works with the concept of a protected garden visually, emotionally, intellectually and aesthetically, the exhibition was structured in 5 sections: prospects and thresholds depicted by painters of designed gardens (which symbolize the division between private and public, between inner self and society); secret gardens, identified with the Pre­Raphaelite concept of a protected and spiritual realm of innocence and enchantment, with frequent allusions to vulnerable femininity and the Christian identification of the enclosed garden or hortus conclusus with the Virgin Mary, salvation and immortality; fragments and inscriptions, where the garden is transformed into a synonym for a nursery of fertile ideals and existential philosophical restiveness; coloured grounds, according to which gardens are transubstantiated into ephemeral colourful surfaces, with individual sculptural substance, depending less on topic and more on colour, form and light1 and, finally, representing and intervening, where the objective is treating the garden as a conceptual and visual field in contemporary art, at a time when people have become more distanced from nature with an increasingly urban population is a given and where the idea of owning or even of the very existence of a private garden is considered to be a precious privilege, a pulsing field of reverie and simultaneously a place under threat or a world that is long since lost.

What viewers will definitely experience on viewing Vasso Triga’s gestural Plant Nurseries / Greenhouses, as those who visited that exhibition in London sensed, is a microcosm that reflects the cycles of nature:  cared for yet controlled; cultivated and subjugated to its cultivators; the plant nursery discourses with events of a contemporary world, making images of the flowing choreography of the artist’s instincts, thoughts and style.

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To Vasso Triga
As you have come to know nature,
you can express it as you like.
 

Α. Fassianos

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... from within the soul of colour...
... the work is the memory of the sensation I had in nature ...

V. Triga