THERESA CHROMATI

Discussing her multifaceted artistic practice, Chromati explains that her work is often anchored around a recurring central female figure, maneuvering through space and time, depicted in a state of becoming. Chromati attempts to capture the ungraspable: that sense of uncertainty when taking charge before leaping into the unknown.

Working across painting, sculpture, sound and installation, Chromati ushers a recurring set of visual elements, which like companion figures construct her pictural vocabulary.

Gracing the spaces of MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique, Chromati’s intervention begins with the gallery window, and continues hand in hand with two large-scale paintings, each one blossoming with various expressions of her simultaneously emotional and intellectual research of being and becoming.

Tying all three visuals together, Chromati’s scrotum flower punctuates the exhibition with its presence, apearing first on the window, and reappears in each painting. Perhaps best defined as a companion, or element of support to her female central figure, the scrotum flower is Chromat’s visual expression of the union of masculine and feminine energy, a totem for balance and power throughout her practice. The scrotum flower lives within her paintings, and expands throughout the gallery space.

I Am the Sweet Nectar I Long to Taste ( acceptance ) is a compact, virtuous blend of bright apricot orange, baby pink and crimson red that fill the canvas to the brim against a contrasting backdrop of light blue and deep purple. These colors are activated by energetic, rhythmic, whimsical black lines and glitter, that create a sense of perpetual movement on the canvas surface. At its heart, a black, fuzzy nest-like shape blooms with the spontaneity of yellow petals and loosely applied glitter. Chromati’s vocabulary unravels across the canvas: a hand bottom left, a scrotum flower bottom right, and progressively, a figure appears: thighs, breasts, a foot all come alive with the bursting energy of her vivid, stylized lines that outline and anchor the body, allowing it to take up the space it needs to bloom.

Conversely, Felt-I Am the petals blowing in the wind ( woman in transit ) is an exploration of movement. With a highly graphic streak, the composition seems to materialize a whirlwind of elements, both material and virtual, creating a vortex-like scene within the carnal red pouch that envelopes its subject. Depicted from the side, the figure seems to be dancing with or against her own body, respectively gliding and twisting in opposite directions. This sense of diversion translates the ambivalence between past and future, remembrance and moving forward, and the hiatus of void and uncertainty once a leap is taken into the unknown. Grounded in the figure’s purple foot depicted at the bottom left of the canvas, it is the starting point of the painting, carrying her entire figure. The body twists and turns from the bottom to top, opening up towards infinite possibilities.

Perhaps as abstract as they are visually compelling, Chromati’s paintings explore the frontiers of figuration, allowing space for sensation and intuition to guide the act of painting. The body is always present, yet it morphs into a flower, becomes a set of dislocated shapes in movement, interacting with exterior and internal elements. With Lullaby’s for the Living, Chromati cradles us into a moment of deep breath, a soothing parenthesis from reality, inviting us to reflect on the complexities of self-acceptance, and to move forward, like her beings, with the only certainty that the unknown is a mystery to us all.

MASSIMODECARLO