My works always arise in an interplay between my perception of reality and its artistic realization in images. They are not intended to be based on circumstances or to document them. Instead they try to bring the various pass of time to a momentary standstill, in which I also conceptually explore the various connotations about the material that interests me, bundle them and put them into a generally valid and timeless context.

I see art as a detachment from theory. We live among a desert of signs that are mutually dependent, mutually contradictory and mutually exclusive. Probing or achieving balance in the play between these forces, I see as one of the most interesting artistic objectives.

I am particularly interested in seeking balance between ambivalent pairs of signs and assume that intuition is strongly relativized by language in our perception of events.

I was born in Santiago de Chile. My father, who was Italian, had moved there from Italy before the Second World War, and had married my mother Eliana there. She is of English and French heritage. My father’s profession caused us to live for a lengthy period in Bolivia, where I completed my high school exams. I moved to Germany to study social sciences, philosophy, Romance studies, and art history at the Universität zu Köln. After passing my First and Second State Examinations (in the area of High School Tuition), I became a teacher at a Gymnasium (high school) where I taught art, social sciences, and Spanish. In addition to teaching, I began to become a professional painter, ultimately leaving my teaching job. In 1986, I completed a six-year course of study in painting and sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Since I finished my studies, I have been working as an independent artist. Following my marriage to Walter Nikkels, I moved to Dordrecht in The Netherlands, where I have been living and working since 1996.

What are the pictures behind the pictures …
Despite – or perhaps because of – the fact that at the Staatliche Kunstakedemie Düsseldorf, I studied painting and sculpture. In my artwork, I soon began to combine these two forms of depiction, sometimes in the form of installation spaces.
This interdisciplinary tendency, which has been there from the beginning, continues to occupy an important space in my work to this day. In contrast to traditional sculpture, this kind of installation intervenes in the space that immediately surrounds it, shaping and altering that space. Ever since the start of my artistic development, the complex possibilities of installation presentations have fascinated me. Solutions that I have found include constructive reliefs that I install in connection with the monochrome picture. In their interaction with the viewer, these artworks also enable the viewer to recognise different viewpoints and perspectives, and different structures. The lighting conditions in the room influence the drawing on the wall and on the monochrome image surface. The wall drawings and serially-created artworks also have this character of relating to the space, attesting to this fascination. I occasionally work simultaneously in different media, such as video and photography. These are either placed into a relationship with each other, expanded upon through painterly interventions, installed in their thematic context, or published in the form of artist books in the American tradition of the “art book”.
The dissolution and fusion of traditional disciplines has possessed a great importance in my work, as an important characteristic of contemporary art that has found a new variation. Examples include, among others, the work of Gerhard Richter and Günther Förg.
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Early on, I developed a feeling of scepticism regarding what I considered to be very subjective value concepts of “knowledge”, of “truth” or of “reality” – not only as spread by the mass media, but also as they are often expressed in “representational” art.

A flood of information and images that are spread, among other factors, by the mass media, are a constant part of our everyday lives. Second by second, we consume “unsorted” images of terror, war, persecution, poverty, hunger, and violence paired with promising representations of wealth, consumption, luxury, pleasure, and prosperity in a beautiful world.

From the beginning of my artistic development, I have been asking myself the following questions: 

Can art produce enduringly valid answers to all the complex questions of our time without becoming a topical commentary? 

To what extent do contemporary cultural, social, and political phenomena influence self-reflection, personal perception, our emotional and social ability to empathise, to be loyal, to show friendship or a willingness to help?

These questions led me to the realisation that creating images that speak for themselves is far more important to me than the immediate answering of these questions. I arrived at the insight that I am more interested in images that are abstracted from their specific context – historical or topical – so that the implemented image loses its temporal character.

This scepticism and the need to search for the essential in my art brought me into proximity with Concrete Art and Minimal Art. Surely reinforced by my previous experience of living in different lands, by my previous complex studies at the University, and by my cultural roots, my interest turned towards the fundamental matter of engaging with surface, colour, and composition and with the principles of order of Concrete Art and Minimal Art. Even as a young girl, I saw original works by Concrete artists in São Paulo/Brazil.

The primary impulses of my way of seeing proceed from an abundance of sensory impulses that originate from pictorial art itself, from literature, from the media, and, above all, from my own focused observation and perceptions of my environment. All of these aspects find expression in my work. Without evaluation or empathy, and without commentary. 

In their formal implementation, my pictures are painterly abstractions, compositions that, in terms of form, can admittedly be grouped with the severe visual language of Concrete Art and Minimal Art, but which do not adhere to their mathematical dogma.
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Like other artists, I worked within these neighbouring currents in art, in the sense that the artworks developed by me were founded upon a contextual concept. Their composition does not spring from mathematical composition, and is not arithmetically arrived at, but springs from my “pure” intuition. My pictures are initially created as drawings and are transferred to the canvas by means of meticulous working processes. They frequently present small, almost imperceptible shifts, which embed my own very personal note in the constructively created artwork. They are abstract pictures with a severely composed ambience that nonetheless present another layer of meaning – mostly invisible, but not beyond perception. Ideally, this makes possible a dialogue between the artwork and the viewer, with the viewers challenged to themselves become active by activating their powers of imagination and generating their own interpretation of the artwork.

Although, in formal terms, I generally strive for the formal visual language shared by Concrete and Minimalist Art, the specific manifestation – as created by my own personal act of applying the paint – is also important to me. This personal application of the paint conveys, among other things, the “presence of the artist”.

This tendency was particularly reinforced when I went to The Netherlands, where the study of water and light began to interest me more than they had previously done. I was also fascinated by the use of primary colours on ships, and how they contrasted with the more atmospheric colour of the river and of the surrounding landscapes. This last factor inspired me to create a series of pictures whose formal implementation features contrasts between dissolving colours and severely monochrome surfaces. Artworks with divisionistic patches and contrasting colour combinations were the result. During their creation, I analysed the spectrum of contrasts and the resulting dynamics. I enlarged these patches until I found my way back to large surfaces of geometrical clearly delimited colour fields. For me as a painter, this process of engagement was extremely important, showing me that paint can do more and be a more extensive medium than I could previously have imagined. Even I was surprised by the abstract large-format works resulting from this period.

In recent decades, my artworks have increasingly moved back towards the severity and radical qualities of Concrete Art and Minimal Art, towards the geometrical abstraction that has been my natural home since the beginning of my artistic development. The artworks become ever more severe, radical, minimal. To mention just one of the new components, the use of industrial enamel paint in particular assists the theme of the anonymity and isolation of the individual.

Teresiña Talarico