Pinturas

ReDot Fine Art Gallery is extremely honoured to be hosting the first ever solo show of paintings in Singapore for Australian artist Victoria Cattoni, who originates from Ingham, in the tropics of north Queensland.

Pinturas marks the first major body of paintings to be exhibited by the artist in over 20 years, in a career which spans back to 1988 when Victoria did her first solo show at Dick Bett Gallery (now Bett Gallery) in Hobart, the year after graduating from her Arts Degree.

Over the subsequent 25 years or so the majority of her artistic output has been expressed through the medium of videos, installation and/or performance art, exhibiting extensively throughout Asia, where Victoria travelled, settled and continues to work. It was not until 2011 that she suddenly decided to return to her roots and the more intimate medium of canvas paintings. Commenting on the change in 2011, she says:

"The return to painting was a sudden urge – I literally woke one morning and wondered where my oil paints were (which country!) and wanted very much to put paint on canvas. This may seem a rather wide leap from my art practice of the past twenty years – installation, video, performance art - but whose creative path is linear? The urge to paint again, I feel, came from a desire to touch and fashion something with my hands and body; it was perhaps an antidote, and a salve to the digital screen."

This decision led to her first trip to Portugal, where she spent six weeks at Obras, an arts residency set in the landscape of the Alentejo region, east of Lisbon. She has returned twice to the same residency since and the body of work on exhibition is a collection from these and other residencies over the last 5 years. Whilst Victoria maintains that she never stopped painting, it certainly took a background role to her other practice and she has rarely exhibited this medium until today.

Her work follows no prescribed rules, there is no plan and she has no idea of what the painting will be; she tries to set up conditions so that she can enter a space in which she can move between playful abandon and intense consideration. There is a need to touch and feel and work and move about with colour and tools and music; to create surprising paintings that both she and the viewer can wander through and over and get lost in.

The results can be perceived as captured frames of fuzzy stories in which certain impulses are sensuously ‘netted’ and rendered onto a surface with paint. It is a ‘scape’ of love, loss, colour, beauty, problem solving, wandering, and a lull, leaving the mind behind, even for just seconds at a time.

The exhibition begins on Wednesday 21st October and runs until Saturday 21st November 2015 and will be attended in person by Victoria Cattoni to share this beautiful body of new works.