The exhibition project Re-connect proposes both the eponymous series, in progress since 2019, and several works from previous series of Connections, which follow and elucidate the path towards a visual formula that has been defined over nearly two decades.
The exhibition retraces the evolution of the image from figurative and decorative towards abstraction and an organizing spatial geometry – through the essentialization and investing with symbolic value of an anatomical fragment parallel to the citation of traditional African fabric expressions. The hand that leaves a shadow on the image / over reality is stylized and reiterated until it forms a continuous field – a network of repetitive gestures that recalls the African folkloric motif. The motif and spatiality of these structures are then revisited in various chromatic variations, glossaries with the infinite combinations offered by a refined and restrained palette, almost consistently placed in the realm of cool colors. Beti Vervega’s painting gradually develops once this order of an almost graphic network, with a role of support / motivation at the level of connection between matter and expression, and conceptual justification of the artistic gesture of inducing a form of control over an amorphous matter, towards an abstraction that almost entirely renounces narrative. At the same time, in works from recent years, the pictorial and chromatic tension tends to annul the rigor of the modular structure that has become emblematic of her artistic approach, and the geometric organization system gradually loses some of its graphicness and becomes colorful, transparent, integrated into a chromatic field increasingly stratified in overlapping depths.
The exhibition includes, alongside works that have not been exhibited before – such as the most recent explorations of the materiality and spatiality of paper works, almost object-like, which only vaguely retain the form of the initial element, or those in which she experiments with the dimension and form of the support and focuses her research on geometric fragments, a step closer to the complete erasure of the network – several landmarks of the trajectory towards and from geometry, even among the first canvases of the series of Connections.
Re-connect is a condensation of an artistic project that has evolved in close connection with the existential journey and heralds a new stage of the artist Beti Vervega’s creation – an exploration of the freedom of expression offered by the language of painting.
by Mălina Ionescu
