Aida Tomescu, The ear in the river and the prayer in the stone II, 2022, triptych. Courtesy: The artist and Fox Jensen Gallery, Sydney.

There is no texture in Tomescu’s paintings. These are not paintings about surface – nor are they made in the pursuit of legibility – rather, like Tomescu they aspire to clarity. There is no room for bravura in Tomescu’s performance. Such theatre would be an indulgence and certainly for her, simply too much is at stake to risk that.

For Aida Tomescu, work is work and through it comes the opportunity for evolution. It also exists as a metaphysical foundation upon which she constructs the opportunity to be captive of deeper esoteric perception and perhaps to discern the nature of transition. You must yield to embrace their panoramic scale and their certain impact on you. These are the kinds of experiences one wants to have with painting of course – unavoidable and forceful, there is joy in these paintings, in their marvellous resolution of dissonance and rhapsody.

This notion of coalition between elements, recalls something of Cezanne’s famous dictum that “when the colour achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also”. The pursuit of unity depends on exchanges and on her preparedness to let something good go in pursuit of a greater accord. Tomescu can sound curiously agnostic about colour. Or rather, she resists the idea that colour, in and of itself, is sufficient, and certainly she resists that it be chosen as a conduit for emotion. Emotions to one side, whether she chooses colour or it chooses her, colour exists a vital element, as it was for Cezanne, in achieving the fullness of form.

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