Cycle of landscape Painting

Mariana Alasseur - Paintings - House of Art in Opava ( 2008) within of the exhibition project Three women ( M. Alasseur, I. Juzova, D. Alster) text : Richard Drury - HEAD OF THE ART DEPARTMENT ( GASK - Gallery of the Central Bohemian Region) Mariana Alasseur's painting holds immediate appeal for the viewer with its powerful visual quality that stems from her resolve to strip perceived reality of all secondary detail and thus rediscover and portray the relationship between the individual and the world. In her pictures, Alasseur presents an object reality that is reduced to the simplest sign, a sign that is, however, capable of bearing a complex symbolic message. The essential aspect here is the search for the core of our "˜ordinary' context, in other words the point at which the human eye and the mind marvel at how nothing in our existence is self-evident. We can find further characteristic features of Alasseur's approach in the monumental conception of the pictorial composition and in the economical treatment of compositional elements which appear, almost "˜abandoned', on a seemingly vacant background. A crucial role in the picture is played by striking colour: bold, open monochrome areas worked with broad, sweeping brushstrokes create an unbounded space reinforcing the presence of the central thematic motif and its symbolic potential. The thoughtful and concentrated basis of Mariana Alasseur's creative vision manifests itself in her ability to explore the rich formal spectrum of a kind of "˜intimate landscape', not only in nature itself but also in the commonly experienced setting of everyday life. For example the cross-section through a pepper gives rise to a simple and, paradoxically, ambiguous form suggesting the dimension of a figural reading. In multiplied numbers, the stylised rendering of an aubergine becomes something that is iconically exalted and playfully ironised at the same time. Throughout, we sense a carefully considered process by which the chosen motif is optically and symbolically "˜compressed' and filled with the artist's inner reflections on the concrete world. An important feature of Mariana Alasseur's pictures (as she has herself confirmed) is their "˜classical' compositional balance, enabled in no small part by the square format that she regularly uses. This respecting of the fundamental rules of pictorial structure is a questioning one, however, curiously searching for new approaches to composition.