Landscape and Calligraphies of Light

Betina Attas’s work is an exploration of landscape and its expansive power as a space for spiritual construction within the history of painting. Her works approach color as vibration, creating a perceptual experience that begins with a stain and extends into the forms of growth found in nature.

Like an allegory of the Japanese tradition of drawing through shadow, her works recreate the projection of light over water and forests. The progression toward abstraction unfolds with great subtlety in each stain, which creates delicate branches across the canvas, while every white glaze gives light an intricate cartography. In her work, the softness and depth of color recall Kawabata’s Japanese texts, in which nature creates an emotional, romantic atmosphere. In Japan, the tradition of the sakura, or cherry-blossom landscape, and the observation of the lightness of the transient connect us with the perfection of life in the present; Zen philosophy and Shinto arise from this experience.

Each horizon in the artist’s work opens us to the energetic intensity of painting as a territory. Painters such as Friedrich, Rothko, Bleckner, Doig and Cambre, among others, connect with her way of painting, since each has recreated a new reality of landscape within the history of the visual arts. Blues, blacks, whites, reds and golds are the vibrant pigments of a new dawn.

The fluctuation of color, the landscape born of the trace of a mark, brings forth calligraphies of light: fireflies whose paths the artist makes glow within the work. In each flash of light, our spirit connects with the transcendent.

Curatorial text by Fabiana Barreda, 2018.