The work: Georgia Tsarouhas, Doesn’t Matter, 2022. Oil on canvas, 220 x 153cm. $6,500.Courtesy: the artist
Abstraction as an aesthetic approach allows an artist to explore intangible ideas, eliminating distractions and allowing their audience to focus on the emotive capabilities of paint. Melbourne-based, self-taught artist Georgia Tsarouhas has embraced the medium’s metaphysical potential in her work Doesn’t Matter, a richly hued piece that evokes themes of interconnectivity and internal languages. Tsarouhas prefers large canvasses within her practice, working them over with silky oils in an almost meditative technique, thickly layering different shades of red in a cascade of light and colour. This use of red evokes associations with the bodily, or in the words of Tsarouhas, depicts “a visceral voyage – a muscular internal exploration of seeing, feeling, and letting go”. Dark swathes of obsidian grey emerge at the edges of the piece, a backdrop of stillness against which the red oils swirl and bleed. Thin passages of bright white and pink link together and draw apart, creating what is almost a net or web against stretches of deeper ruby tones. The artist refers to the latter as “chasms” of stillness, areas which possess depths unknown, and yet instil a feeling of calm rather than the unease usually associated with uncharted territory.