By Melvyn Minnaar
Exhibition: Paintings by Jill Trappler
at the Association for Visual Arts Gallery until May 17
One of the existential pleasures of being on the receiving end of what good artists invent, is that rush of recognition it can evoke.
It's the tingle of inevitability, the thrill of integrated completeness. It's the sort of artwork that just seems to make sense. You stand in front of the painting and somehow it just seems perfectly right.
Jill Trappler's art - an easy handle would be to describe it as "non-figurative" even though that is limiting the enigmatic resonance - is as much about the manner and medium of painting as it is about what her completed visual statements "say". These, her most recent works, are, even more than before, robust testimony of her personal passion. Yet, or exactly because that, the best are charged to zing in the mind.
They carry their own logic conclusively in strong strokes, surface-conscious tones, invented geometry and painterly topography.
In a painting such as No 24, a hefty slab of dense yellow hovers high against the void defined by a soaring vertical block of mutating blue, held back by a craggy buff of brown. One is not quite sure what it is or what it could be, but it is great to look at.
If we detect elements inferring landscape here, a horizontal sweep such as neighbouring No 23 is more open to symbolic possibilities: earthy brown, hearty green and cheery yellow may well show up as that.
But then, just to make sure we're not getting single-minded about this, the dynamic waves are contained by spatial interruption on the right.
In the same manner one could read No 40 as a seascape, invent No 12 as a gutsy flag, or consider No 3 as a glorious state of spirituality, but why bother to confer such limits when the pleasure plugs in?