Susie Gadea: A flight towards the Light
Susie Gadea has given us a pleasant surprise with her first solo exhibit, “Connection: be the wind, soar to the light”, encompassing a series of 23 paintings in acrylic and mixed media on canvas. The showing immediately encourages us to go beyond assessing issues relating to the apparent effectiveness and subtlety with which this artist conveys her personal visual universe, depicted with vitality in sublime and expressive transparencies.
Susie Gadea was born in Peru and received her artistic formation at the Brisbane School of Art, in Australia, where she lived for almost a decade. In 1978 she settled in the Dominican Republic, attained a degree in psychology and worked as a consultant in graphic design and communication. In recent years she gained prominence as head of her own design studio, specializing in tourism promotion and in the production of training material for educational and development institutions.
The works she exhibits at Casa de Bastidas are the consequence of a spiritual awakening which, at this stage of her creative life and through painting, allows her to expand her exploration of the invisible structure of the elements of life and nature, as well as the ethical and spiritual condition of human beings, with particular emphasis on freedom, knowledge and the transcendence of spirit over matter.
Monochromatic, subtly luminous, ethereal in atmosphere, somewhat white-washed yet iridescent. Creator of a harmoniously playful visual universe, with delicate uses of texture and allusive abstract figurations, clean and passionately lyrical in her discreet profusion of rhythms, tints, melodies and warm hues. The simplicity of Susie Gadea's artistic grammar conveys the inner convictions of a creative personality deeply immersed in spirituality and poetry –more temperate, enthusiastic and daring than tepid–. In that context, the creative experience and the artist are a result of the same –and only– exaltation: the universal unity and diversity of life, with its essential duality: material and spiritual, physical and metaphysical.
In this series of works, of noteworthy intrinsic quality, such as those titled “Joy”, “What keeps matter together”, “Giving life to the wind”, “Life in harmony with itself”, “Without laws or limits”, “Luminous laughter of bells” and “Beyond good and evil”, she rises to a polished level in her refinement of gesture, matter and color.
In the concealed minimalist instinct of these paintings we recognize the unrestrained will of exalting the multiple dimensions and qualities unleashed by the essential. Painting of an artist that seems to adopt nature as her preferred teacher and her spiritual reality as privileged source of inspiration. Effective to a large degree in her search of an expressive synthesis of surprising evoking potential, Susie Gadea has presented her first solo exhibit as a true artist that decides to explore her personal abyss and transmute, in highly poetic and suggestive images, the harvest of her own spiritual growth, her feelings, emotions and most intimate visions.
Amable López Meléndez
Santo Domingo, 2001
DACA/IACA
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Amable López Meléndez is Curator at the Modern Art Museum of Santo Domingo, President of the Dominican Art Critics Association and of the Dominican section of the International Art Critics Association.