Pintores de Galicia

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Carmen Touza, comments to your work

Lyrical Neoexpressionism
Undefined faces, lightly sketched figures, common objects as synoptical visions, carmine, vermilion and violet black abnegating atmospheres are more than forms or silhouettes. The concrete becomes inadmissible - it shrinks and dissolves into cool green transparencies, as if moist, alongside yellows that resemble unimaginable reflections of the sun. The geometry of spheres, cylinders and cones are outlined with solid and contrasting strokes.
Carmen Touza is restrained passion. With her bold, almost aggressive, but thoughtful brush-stroke, nothing is improvised in her painting. On the contrary, everything is thought out, mentally rehearsed. She visualizes the final outcome prior to its swift and resolute culmination, reached in execution like the acrobat who risks a somersault, unaided, hiding all those many hours of work-out and training.
And thus an innovative expressionism is achieved, with its roots in the pre-war German schools, but which also shares in that lyricist French evasiveness and reaches Vuillard and above all the ineffable Matisse, who, in many ways, is the true creator of worlds.
Carmen Touza has exhibited her painting throughout Galicia, Spain, and the world over, from Italy to Portugal, Germany, Austria and the United States. In less than a decade she has made her mark in a country such as ours, rich in painters, to whom some she relates, such as the recently departed María Victoria de la Fuente.
She is full of vitality, expansive; precise in her judgement and at times dreamy. She loses herself when listening to a speaker whose speech interests her. She is very aware of what she does and is even more conscious of what remains to be done. Her palette is warm, her gaze radiant, and her spirit orchestral, to such a degree that her painting affords her something symphonic, Mozartian, with chromatic graphic expression that ranges from direct and spontaneous sketching to a precision stroke. It is the colours, upon merging on the base, that dictate the final tone. And thus she achieves those textures with the nonchalance they possess, upon contemplation, somewhat like the ineffable feel of velvet, gratifying, and at the same time disturbing, implying that the eye could behave like the hand that caresses that to which it is attracted.
She does not search for beauty. Moreover, she intimately rejects it, for we are before a painter who is utterly far from the commonplace, and fortuitously forgotten, feminine painting. Baroque when she so desires, more so before her still-lifes, the traditional cultivators of the genre, from Arellano to the 17th century Flemish painters, would feel uneasy and perhaps even horrified. Far from all preciosity, it is the as she simply blurs the images because she draws, and can allow herself that freedom, she achieves attractive, exultant vitality without the need for oiliness or pointless recreations.
For Carmen Touza, a nude is little more than a silhouette, and what interests her is the atmosphere attained from a deliberate, highly expressive and almost monochromatic synthesis. It is this that fails to impede her at arriving at a pleasing intimacy, which insinuates, if not already evidently present, an intimate tenderness, like ingenuity, along the lines of that which gave personality to María Antonia Dans, only incidentally comparable in name to our artist.
As we examine her work, we scarcely find a theme related to the exterior world or the outdoors. And it is that her impressionist roots, now completely surpassed, lead her to understand that painting is not about what you paint, but how you paint. And the obligation that the artist has of reinventing and converting reality into the abstract is perhaps better reached by starting from imaginary interiors in which the human figure, always feminine, is found surrounded by flowers, objects, and a multitude of odds and ends that provide surprising contrasts in tone, which perhaps sprung from the masters that she saw, and still stir, in her subconscious, without her wanting or being able to define them. And here one could quote from an almost long list, which would range from Catalans such as Rogent o Galicians like Barreiro, and even as far as Botello, the indirect disciple of Gaughin, of whom Carmen Touza has been almost unable to see a painting.
Traditional perspective disappears in this painting. More than distances, to dissimulate the third dimension into two, there are terms, though they all become vertical, deliberately variegating, for the painting to talk, or better shout out in its chromatic exultancy. Furthermore, it does so using uncommon formats, great, almost huge compared with those of today, because it is painting that needs to breath, to spread, to enjoy its own everlasting freshness, and make the onlooker rejoice.
If the artist can and should respond to her time, Carmen Touza's painting, without need for impacting, and ultimately ephemeral vanguards, responds to the best tradition and is absolutely present today, tomorrow, and with a slight touch of the historical yesterday.

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Perhaps what best defines Carmen Touza is her ability to live through painting as if it were an experience of searching and understanding, but she also wishes to transmit art as being alive and naked. Reminding us, time, that her painting is pure intensity, pure joy of souland sight, pure jubilation, pure irradiation, emotion and vibration.
Floating in the light that her blues or purples irradiate, her silvers or her sacramental blacks, which are also action and breathing, emptiness and plenitude, music and silence, question answer.
A model on the scale of the totality of the universe where everthing is complementary, black and white like the sun and the moon like the principle active and the priciple passive, in a space that invites mediation and breathing.