Susie Gadea: Waylay play
Nicolas Salmeron Cultural Center, Mantuano 51, Madrid
We are before a Peruvian painter living in Madrid whose personality acquires solvency with each successive exhibits she presents.
Her early training in the Brisbane School of Art in Australia, her subsequent activities in the field of design in the Dominican Republic and her degree in Pshycology, give her the required bagage to embrace the challege that her artistic vocation entails.
In this exhibit, presented under the sugestive title "Sorprender al juego" ("Waylay play"), the artist presents to our consideration a coherent series of paintings (acrilic on canvas) in a language more abstract than expressionist, in which color harmony overides any other consideration. Each painting has unique elements, not only do the different line strokes and figures vary but also the predominant color to which the remaining pallete is subjected and subordinated, to create a coherent yet simultaneously entropic world close to psycodelia.
Each painting has its own personality and they flow between an evolved expressionism, e.g. There once was a cricket…, Fantasy: renovation, Aleph, etc., and a more defined abstraction, e.g. Integration, Satisfaction, Inocence, Antidote for gravity, etc., with roots in Kandinsky's work from the period that stretches from the start of Der Blaue Reiter to the break of his collaboration with the Soviet revolution, a time which birthed this artistic style and the biomorpfic elements of his subsequent stages.
Kandiski himself wrote: "Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and color, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential."
We venture to assert that Susie Gadea fully enjoys these qualities and sensitivity, and a poet's soul which she reflects in her works and gives them a magic breath that moves emotions and feelings, because the artist knows how to handle the essential elements she finds in painting, which go beyond strictly artistic values and derive from her feeling color as "an expression of non-visible energy."
Susie Gadea confesses that her creations are born in an almost compulsive manner. She does not speak of inspiration. Does not study or plan her works. She paints when she feels the breath of an inner force she can hardly define, but that irresistibly drives her to paint.
This is when she positions beside or over the white canvas and starts her work, perhaps marking a line, maybe dropping a blotch, perhaps drawing a figure. From there, her soul and her ability take over, resulting in complex formal and chromatic structures, in which harmonic contrasts and different spatial levels can be seen. Here, possibly, lies that freshness, that strength and nerve, that each of her pictures conveys.
Her color-rich palette, shaded on the canvas, plays a primordial role in the composition, their pastel-leaning tones, also used in the earlier stages of her work, give the compositions a delicate and finished touch proficiency which evokes poetry.
This artist also knows how to draw. Absolutely. She presents just over half a dozen small drawings, in ink and watercolor, that are works of great consistency.
Undaunted strokes are used to portray that which an out of the ordinary imagination can conceive: figures and unusual images that are full of balance and eurythmy.
Susie Gadea knows how to handle lines and colors. And she does it decisively and without fears, as she avows.
Benito de Diego González
Madrid, 2012
Benito de Diego González is member of the Spanish Association of Art Critics and of the Madrid Association of Art Critics. Many of his writings are available in his blog: http://www.domusdidaci.blogspot.com