Rosa Brun’s work seeks to extend the scope of painting in the direction of sculpture and, conversely, to turn sculpture into a pictorial form or an element of colour. Her wall-mounted pieces look like canvases with clearly defined fields of colour, but they challenge the two-dimensional nature of conventional painting by seeming to move towards the viewer, revealing spaces between the wall and the support of the paintings and complex links between the various pieces on show. She works at the frontier between different disciplines, which gives her work a feeling of radical exploration. In her own words, “My work always stands at the limit, so that it is hard to ascribe it to a particular category [...]. Multiple meanings are denoted by opposing categories, for instance in regard to gravity, balance/imbalance, colour, light/darkness, matter and objective /incorporeal nature. Through these opposing forces I can use a single structure to pursue a continuous, silent quest for the visible aspects of an event, an experience that I seek to project as an internal reflection”.
Dextro (2003) pushes against the limits of painting through two chromatic extensions: the upper one leans towards the lower one, generating a false perspective. As the work shifts into three dimensions, there is a feeling of strangeness that invites viewers to think about the physical limits conventionally imposed on painting. Brun thus aligns herself with a trend that can be traced back to the geometrical abstraction of the early avant-gardes, but she renews that trend using aspects based on perception and produces a subtle critique of the way in which expositional devices delimit and condition space. Indeed, in Spanish the word dextro means the area on church grounds where sanctuary and other privileges could be claimed. The title thus hints at the idea of painting and sculpture as a temenos, a protected sacred area governed by rules different from those of the outside world.
Other works by Rosa Brun