Sabrina Brouwers and Taya De La Cruz are the two painters, but neither artist boundaries herself to the common established of applications for generating their perform.
By Phin Jennings | 20 Jan 2023
Sabrina Brouwers and Taya De La Cruz are both of those painters, but neither artist boundaries herself to the common set of tools for generating their function. Brouwers’ layered, semi-geometric summary paintings are dominated by overlapping grids and circles, rendered applying rulers and compasses. De La Cruz employs health-related syringes to dispense tiny blobs of paint, making styles which she then adorns with even smaller terms and letters in ink. Equally artists deal with the contrast amongst uniformity and chaos, calculation and possibility. For Brouwers, this manifests alone in the form of excellent circles stuffed with imperfect brushstrokes for De La Cruz, it is in the distinction concerning coloured spots administered using health care resources and the artist’s have handwriting.
Spring, Summer time, Autumn and Winter (all 2022, gesso, acrylic and ink on wood panel, 42 x 30cm)
Drawn collectively partly by their shared interest in this stress – on a Zoom contact, De La Cruz describes Brouwers’ paintings as “a definitely gorgeous hybrid of controlled and wild” – the two have collaborated on a sequence of four mixed-media paintings. Named following the four seasons, the modestly and uniformly-sized will work on panel mix Brouwers’ networks of traces and curves with De La Cruz’s writing. In Spring, “To see matters in the seed, that is genius,” a quotation frequently attributed to Chinese philosopher Laozi, is repeated about the circumferences of a collection of intersecting circles of various sizes sitting on (and at times leaping off of) a chilly light blue and off-white grid. Autumn’s outlook is much less spritely. The grid continues to be, as do the obedient and disobedient circles, but there are now shades of ochre yellow and burgundy and De La Cruz’s handwriting narrates as “everything gets prepared to rest”. When I spoke with the artists, I figured out from De La Cruz that the phrases for Autumn were being tailored from a much more grim quote from creator Patrick Rothfuss: “In autumn, all the things is fatigued and completely ready to die”. But, of study course, almost everything doesn’t die. autumn ends, and winter season will come. And then spring, then summertime, then an additional autumn: a cycle.
Spring, 2022, gesso, acrylic and ink on wood panel, 42 x 30cm
The artists had been thinking of cycles when they made a decision to create this collection jointly: the menstrual cycle, the lunar cycle, the seasons. Like Brouwers’ circles, these cycles force onwards and outwards just before returning to their beginnings. “The foundation grid is a refined reference to the calendar yr,” Brouwers tells me, introducing a rigidity in between a cyclical comprehension of time and the rigid, linear knowing just one that we may possibly be used to – the kind that has us crossing off times one particular by one particular. This tension seems in line with the duality that equally artists deal with in their possess apply: there are no cost-flowing cycles and circles, and there is regimented, linear calendar time. To me, the paintings really feel like a rejection of the latter. The calendar-like grids are embellished with a chaotic technique of circles that wax, wane, mature, shrink, and finally return to their beginnings. Each portray – just about every time – provides with it a new experience, it also suggests that factors will occur back close to. Even in Autumn, we see compact patches of Spring’s blue, reminding us that it isn’t far absent.
Autumn, 2022, gesso, acrylic and ink on wood panel, 42 x 30cm
On the surface area, the paintings are about the optimism of spring, the pleasure of summertime, the tiredness of autumn and the bleakness of wintertime. Really, they are an homage to the cycles that surround us and individuals that are within just us. “It all kind of arrived again to…looking at it as more of a daily life cycle,” De La Cruz explains to me. With this in head, on the lookout at Spring, Summer time, Autumn and Wintertime, I sense serene in the awareness that – In the environment, in the entire body and, eventually, in my lifetime – return is inevitable.
