Art Nexus      José Luis Barrios

When we drive down the street and suddenly come to a fork in the road, most of the time we feel obligated to make some decision. A decision that in the first place was preceded by its own uncertainly, the act of freedom we took when the car was put in motion. Who hasn’t felt almost mortal anguish trying to think which way to go in a moment when a bridge guardrail crashes down, and we have to keep the car under control in the middle of the choice that put us on these roads  to God knows where?  This is among the many decisions-(in)decisions Trini paints that are set forth in the exhibition at the Praxis gallery in Mexico City this summer.

If something is characteristic of Trini, it’s that she makes painting an evocation and a record. One could think that her work is at once an environment and a narrative, the whisper of the air and the glow of the light, but it’s also the solidity of objects, animals, people and things. Looking at the works in this show, some set in the urban landscape of Mexico City and the great majority in the urban and sea scapes of Cuba, we are immediately struck by a question directed at our senses of smell and sight, and the movement of our body.

In the streets of Old Havana, along the waterfront of the weary ports of Cuba’s beaches or in the big cloverleafs of the Inner Beltway of Mexico City, it seems to have just stopped raining. There’s an aroma of water in Trini’s works; that’s their atmosphere. There’s the porosity of the textures, which are eternal pathways for touch and sight. But above all, there’s chiaroscuro, that plastic technique in which things and space open the inner qualities of their movement. Along with the formal resolution that this artist of Belgian origin gives to light and shading, there’s displacement of the looks and the body in space.

This juxtaposition, in my judgement, is her best achievement. On one hand, the manipulation of light lets her overcome and transcend the repetitive, monotonous and boring solutions of hyperrealism, but even more the implicit device in painting two points, situations or aspects of the same object or same space lets her articulate an expansion of the composition, wherein lies the meaning of the configuration and structure of the narrative element of her works. Thus, speaking of narration in her pieces, the viewer is involved in two senses, in the visual equivalent of a play on words: one the emotional and affective meaning of the scenes that are depicted and the other the objective and real dislocation that the viewer must make in order to grasp how she achieves these effects of meaning and comprehension — or the absence of correspondence between the space and the places that the objects occupy – and what all these produce in him.  This general “tone” of the exhibition is made more than clear in the small triptychs: Brincar o ¿ceder? is like cinematographic pans, not from left to right, but from right to left. This is where the objective participation of the viewer is indispensable to putting together what the painting narrates, because of how the series makes us reposition ourselves to do so. Paintings of visual simultaneities, moving and tactile.  Decisiones is a painterly exercise in which, after the first impression that the works in the show can make, we without doubt are confronted by the intelligent use that an artist makes of her perception of the world. But above all, we come face-to-face with Trini’s reflective exercise of painting as a way of moving and looking at the world, things and objects. Suffice it to say that some of the many paintings in Decisiones take account of the fact that we are active viewers for us to construe their meaning. Looking at a bridge that offers two possible ways forward (Predecidido) is to view from outside the painting and at the same from inside a car barely evoked in the composition.

That’s the only way to explain how forms and objects as solid as a bridge or signs with the names of city streets and avenues suddenly appear to move. Something similar happens in the work Detener. The woman is too close to us to be able to be really seated on a wall that could be a pier in Cuba. But more than its disproportion, it’s about the simultaneity suggested in the work of at least two perceptions of the same situation and of two distinct distances. All the meaning of the use of chiaroscuro, diffumination (blurring) and manipulation of light arise from these devices. These elements function as the internal widening of the vision, that is to say, as what endow the narrative construction of her paintings with temporality or slow time. The almost hyperrealist tone of the painting surprises, as the shapes and bodies are filled with their own intimacy from the vibration of the color. Her painting is, no doubt, in a mid-place between repose, the hermeticism and silence of the objects, spaces and bodies, and the whisper, movement and expansion of light and color.

Reality is the limit of art’s language. Literature, painting and the theater have a frontier in the place where things impose their fundamentality: Their externality is almost always fathomless. For Trini, painting is about these interiors and exteriors of the world. That is, it’s about the instant of the look, and the movement of the gaze, and bodies in the middle of, and through, things. Trini’s is painting of verification and participation.