Aida Tomescu Interview – By Katrina Strickland – Sydney Morning Herald/The Age – 7 November 2025
“Almost everything about Tomescu’s practice defies easy assumptions. Her works might suggest velocity but she builds them up painstakingly over many years via a process that involves painting, scraping off, painting some more. She works on a few at once and constantly looks for links between them. The paintings tell her when they’re finished. They may look like an emotional outpouring but they’re anything but – such a state would make her lose the clarity essential to her work. “People relate to red as a colour of anger or passion, they see many things in red but it will never be that for me,” she says. “It’s similar to music. Music is not about emotions but it amplifies the emotion in us.” As to sources – Messiaen was one for this show – she says the whole point of art is to “travel the distance away from the artist, from their private life, to become something of its own, with its own, new identity. If there’s a source it will have been transformed in the process until it becomes irrelevant.”