341 Sutter Street |
Online exhibition 2004.
Spellbound by the rich colors and textures of Catalunya’s fertile Terra Alta region, Catalan artist Regina Saura devoted her newest paintings entirely to their capture. Her work is an altogether contemporary hybrid of past and present, converging at the point where traditional landscape painting meets the main conviction of color field abstraction: that the emotive properties of art lie in the power of pigment. Like Rothko, who famously declared that he meant his fields of color to make viewers weep, Saura uses color to elicit an emotional response- in this case, in an effort to parallel the exuberant beauty of the Mediterranean countryside.
The strong horizon line, present in nearly all of her landscape works, is both a nod to the geometry of color field-era abstraction and a literal rendering of Terra Alta’s halcyon, harmonic air. With a palette that might have appeared only in her Fauvist ancestors’ dreams, she “plays with reality and unreality of color,” jolting her canvasses with shocks of pink, orange, yellow and blue that approach fluorescence in chromatic intensity.
The dazzling and utterly modern effect is compounded by Regina Saura’s intensive technique, which incorporates pencil, ink, pastel and text into the acrylic ground. Often functioning as adulterated pattern, the newspaper clippings, strings of numbers and painted words recall the efforts of Apollinaire and other champions of poésie concrete, who sought to saturate even physical text with a sense of a poem. In her own way, Saura brings this theory towards its logical conclusion. Her odes to Terra Alta unfolding on canvas rather than on page, her love for the countryside manifesting itself in celebratory color, Saura’s paintings are so suffused with the spirit of Catalunya that language itself seems to curl and roll with the terrain.