Actor Painting

Valentina Battler is a Canadian artist, poet and musician. Valentina Battler’s painting is diverse in style: from Chinese painting to graphics and Japanese ink technique—suminagashi—drawing on water. Valentina Battler has invoked both the traditions of synesthesia and the influence of art and craft from China and Japan in a wide-ranging aesthetic, a central aspect of which has been a responsive engagement with cultural differences and thematic continuity. Like indigenous paintings from China and Japan, Battler’s aesthetic has its basis in calligraphy and line. All of Battler’s compositions are composed on high-quality Xuan paper—durable, flexible, thick in texture and arctic white. Although Battler’s work is stylized and symbolic, her practice is not principally driven by narrative or storytelling traditionally understood but rather through an intense concentration on motif and form. Her series of paintings ‘Transcending Reality’ is devoted to the memory of the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, whose music—Symphonic Dances —was a prototype of the painting suite. The suite of images ‘Transcending Reality’ is a visual interpretation and a poetic response to the Symphonic Dances Op.45, the last work completed by the composer. Her pen and ink compositions conform to an elegant and dutiful following the canon of classical practice. Valentina Battler’s artworks explore various registers and reinstate a tradition defined by continuity and pragmatic assimilation.