Dionisia Salas is an artist based between Kamberri/Canberra and Braidwood. She s a former studio assistant to Katharina Grosse, and more recently, to the legendary feminist artist, Vivienne Binns.
Lately, the charged abstractions of Salas’ earlier works have grown fluid and complex. Her feeling for colour, and her talent as a colourist, as refined; the surfaces of her paintings are deeper, more nuanced. Regarding yellow as generative, she uses is as a way to start the work. In a recent painting, Mouth, 2022, yellow, gold and umber bloom and purge from a centrifugal force, their internal life and outward effect birthing forms that are fleshy, fluid and scratchy. Mouth is a painting one needs to spend time with - and it carries the feeling that the artist has spent time with it, too. Salas has learned this meditative approach from Binns - to paint and walk away, to think hard on the work - balancing the directness and expressiveness ostensibly gleaned from Grosse.
Enjoying the juiciness and vibrations of her current painting, Salas feels that everything has started to gel. She credits this to experience, and to a realisation that art has to come from life. Motherhood has been important. I has expanded both the breadth and impact of her vernacular. She says the “unfinished language that exists between my children and me” and the constant effort to “gauge their desires and intentions” becomes something like a spiritualist “thought form” in her works.
In her current practice compositional elements cohere and relate. What strikes one is their lightness. Thin veils and tempered surfaces are delicate, nimble, coalescing matter and thought. They form a kind of ecology. A self-referential language which is nonetheless able to reverberate beyond its own terms of reference. These are very much the works of someone who has found their voice.
Salas will show this year at Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Maunka and Megalo Studio Kingston among others. Her work To Fall in Spring, 2022 was recently acquired by the Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, Goulburn.
Mouth, 2022
oil on canvas, 129.5 x 99cm
photograph by David Paterson