Trini and her Figuration of Movement     Luis Carlos Emerich

The more insistently art’s death is predicted, the stronger becomes painting, the medium most often named as the condemned. In the Tenth Biennial of Painting Rufíno Tamayo (2000), in which the work of Trini won an honorable mention, two of her three works thus cited fit not only under the rubric of academic figuration but also manage to reconsider old canons, even though their aims have nothing to do with the Classicists or the Romantics or the Symbolists.

The protracted eminence of Neo-Conceptualism and Objectuality (objetualismo) in the last decades of the 20th Century — which while it has not dared to administer a coup de grâce to painting —  has set forth challenges that far from being intimidating have yielded demonstrations of painting’s ample capacities to absorb, and at the same time give new meaning to, innovations. But above all, distinction is brought to its new considerations by its abilities to strike into so many fields as changes in direction and sense.

The case of Trini (Katrien Vangheluwe, born in Belgium in 1962) is exceptional. Trained in her native land and in the Academy of San Carlos, resident in Mexico for 15 years, she has stood outside the confines of fashion and unaffected by theoretical discussions of post-modernity. She has remained faithful to herself, that is to say, to her academic pictorial vocation, in spite of that for a time being considered inoperable if it weren’t moved towards utilitarian disciplines. However, her work of the 1990s gracefully clears the bar of trial by conceptual reading, without discounting the expressive potential of technical expertise, and much less of formal sensibility and grace, pictorial attributes that are disdained by those incapable of achieving them.

Trini assimilated and mastered the most rigorous pictorial disciplines, but her realism is far from being conventional. Discarding mere representation and elevating it far beyond mimesis, Trini’s realism is much more complex than the seductive virtue of her images or the treatment of the same theme in different tones. It’s realist because it takes on the appearances of physical reality, in order to place identifiable abstractions such as temporality, velocity, the fleeting quality of impermanence, and infiniteness in an identifiable context. As a result, all the motifs of her paintings seem to be in transit, from an unknown place to an improbable one. That’s why her painterly ambit is like a register of vehicles in flight, of visual traces and of trails of energy of people as they pass through the streets; or rather, concentrations of ambient light that like specters of beings and objects fly through the darkness where those qualities have just been set as the stage.

Her “snapshots” of urban bustle derive from photographs taken by the painter herself, but their substance lies in developing the aesthetic implications of the transposition of a mechanical visual language to a manual use, a lyric use, and hence from one semantic terrain to another. Even when her ultimate solution is always redolent of an emotional expression. And so the image isn’t a reproduction of identifiable motifs, but a point of departure that is modifiable, mutable, abstractable around her central theme: the impossibility of certainly defining anything other than by the movement, as if it were the only demonstrable mark of life.

All things pass, have passed, or will. For the artist, her “models” (passersby, cyclists, cars) don’t pose, they pass by. They are trajectories of light and shadow. And their surroundings (the streets and “interiors”) are themselves unstable realms: Day, night, the dead-of-night change them into crossroads where they must make decisions, or points of encounter for the unexpressive gazes of beings absorbed in their own dynamic motion or submerged  in the darkness of their vehicles.

By contrast to the 17th Century genre Vanitas so handy to the 20th and more notably paraphrased by post-modern pessimism, the expression of the fleeting quality of impermanence in Trini’s painting doesn’t allude to the brevity of life, but to its intensity, even if it’s impossible to represent that with its greatest clarity. Nothing decays, even when deep darkness dims the urban flow. Everything happens, because even the unmovable is endowed with the speed of the observer.

This concept of temporality and movement of Trini’s is never really applied to the study of types or peculiar situations or to behaviors or idiosyncracies. It becomes a point of reference for the unrepeatability of all activity, even the most routine or mechanical. It is a lucid  counterproposition to the deception of the supposed permanence of the typical unmoving pose implicit to traditional art, and surely to the guiding icons par excellence of the 20th Century, which like none other was constructed of unrepeatable visual images as if they were normative constants of its totality. For Trini, only movement is permanent, taking repose as one of its special states. And to this goes credit for the prevalence of the pictorial in her work, its symbolic potential and its intentionality, and not necessarily to her subjects, or rather, figurative repertories.

In the work of Trini, movement is the raison d’être, and by extension, the very reason for the painting, which instead of competing with uses the possibilities of photography as tools to expand the limits of human visual perception. The illusion of reality today is, then, more intense than ever, since beneath appearances, which seduce with the dexterity of their representation and the sensibility with which they are expressed, is precisely the concept that underpins them. And this, in the end, is the product of the sensitivity and sensibility to represent the pertinence of the fact that, in the face of a depressing and impenetrable state of world affairs, the search for order must border on tragedy.