The spirit of the opera

In the paintings presented now by Luchi Szerman —an artist of a vast and renowned national and international career— the spirit of the music, with its perceptive and affective intensity, is present. Is it possible to paint that profound experience, so difficult to represent? Many great artists have tried. As Wassily Kandinsky or his friend Arnold Schoenberg did, who joined his musical compositions to his capabilities as a painter.
The opera is present in Luchi Szerman’s work, with its rich world of visual and sound images. This leads her to develop her imagination, alluding to some operatic scores and to also seeing herself right in the environments of some of the great opera theatres.
In every case, the expressive treatment is strictly artistic, without making any use of literary or anecdotic resources. In 1996, Szerman had already exhibited a series of paintings honoring the Colón Theatre, and now she deepens her love for the opera genre in this new series. Two fundamental aspects characterize these works. On one hand, a vibrant chromatic treatment, dominated by red, with explosive shades and gradations of lights and shadows, but where the golden strokes of the majestic operatic architecture are not absent. It doesn’t leave aside the decorated ceilings, reproducing with them the painting inside the painting.
On the other hand, the composite structure of each painting calls the attention, with a daring perspective in different levels, and a dynamic line that establishes contrapositions and asymmetries that refer both to the rhythms of the music and to the theatrical frame in which it magnifies itself.
In these imaginative recreations, with its weight of symbolic elements, the artist utilizes the operatic experience as an icon that solidifies its mythic condition in the baroque expression.

                           Fermín Fèvre - Buenos Aires, September 2004.