Luz                 Luis Carlos Emerich

The shading of light – color that suffuses the image and renders it strange, distant and sometimes without even the most ordinary motif – has been a constant in the painting of Trini. Even if she aimed to blur the lines of distinction between painting and photography, her psychological intensity induces the thought  that the need to retain an elusive memory, or the emotional impression of an image whose fleetingness makes it so potent, will continue to be an urgent human necessity. And certainly more rewarding than any attempt to intellectualize that need.

Thus the perception of physical reality in Trini’s work is of the instant of exposing its symbolic potential, and its depiction serves as mere scaffolding for mental reconstruction of the signs or signals of what passed so rapidly before the eyes, leaving only a trace of light from the memory she tries to decipher in every canvas. Conscious that the art of painting the visible and vivid well can’t transcend that instant, Trini has made the central theme of her vision the processes of modernization whose speed is more resented in those countries where they have slowed. As a result, her hazy and out-of-focus images don’t just suspend time. They loosen the fusion between signs of the past and current life. They extend the concept of distance between the contemplative and the reflective contexts, on towards the realm of psychic memory, which can be historic, and touch the poetic, which can be philosophic.

Shifting the value for factual knowledge and the sensibility for figurative treatment out to her conceptual horizon, Trini explores diverse continents and contents: childhood as a passage that cannot be relived but can be re-interpreted over and over, travel as a revelatory experience of “otherness,” even political realities that lose humanism amid dogmatic rigidity. Thus urban landscapes – or better, life passages as perceived with peripheral vision – in fact pose furtive proofs of the existence of the duality, life and perception. Even as time makes beings and things decay, art is capable of interrupting and freezing it. The phenomenon that makes this possible is omnipresent and ever different: light and its infinite flexibility.

The paintings of Trini are frozen gazes, efforts to record the instant in which everything vanishes, in which light and movement reveal the essence – before the appearance – of the territory and the things. That’s why the horizontal light that lengthens shadows, the half-light  that bleeds the outlines, the backlight that diffuses the near and augments the far are the events that make everything singular: cars ripping though the darkness, passersby resolved into shadows, dying buildings, masses of light depicted as streets. And, in the end, objects whose luminal traces arouse deep fascination by virtue of being absolutely realist, and real.