On material, stratification and alchemy: D-Contemporary presents Eva Chiara Trevisan on ARTSY

Eva Chiara Trevisan’s research focuses on the dynamics of the material used, through an exploration of the alchemical processes of the transmutation of matter.
The relationship with matter is the generating force behind the thought, triggering the dialogue between tactile sensation and visual perception. Conceiving her artworks from an experimentation of the extreme use of acrylic colour, her works unfold in a progressive flow evolving from painting to sculpture and installation. These media are also used as a tool for creative research, through the exploration of the relationship between matter and time, gesture and colour; on the lookout for breaking the boundaries of space and fluidity.

Trevisan is currently facing the challenge of removing the canvas from paint with the aim of disengaging it from the technicality of its base, in order for colour to become the sole protagonist of the work, as well as its own support. This process explores the agency of time over repeated gestures, which are a balanced outcome of decisions and waiting.

This artistic trajectory first started in 2019, when Eva Chiara Trevisan was awarded for a residency programme at Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa in Venice, Italy.
In the work Ciò che permane (What Lingers), the colour starts disengaging from the pre-fixed boundaries of the paper support. Dripping from its borders, the paint starts exploring its material possibilities, whilst hiding the paper behind its carefully placed and layered brushstrokes. What lingers is, in fact, what is left after the action of material transmutation over time. This is possible through the method of stratification, a slow and constant process in which layer after layer, coat upon coat, the material changes its look.

Aspiring to a temporary non-place, the artist found hers in the matter: here, the glance looks for an undefined border, enclosed between materiality and immateriality as in a limbo of possibilities, where everything flows and finds stillness.

In 2020 during the InEdita Residency at Forte Marghera (Venice, Italy) the artist continues to test the technical possibilities of further disengaging the colour from its support. Her attention starts shifting to the idea of something that is inevitably left behind. While the concept of stratification creates new material, the action of the gesture produces something else: a trace, a footprint of the process, which investigates the alchemical transmutation and the philosophical theory about void.

In A veces se me pasa el tiempo (Sometime Time flies me by) - presented for the artist’s first solo show at Marina Bastianello Gallery (Venice, Italy) in 2021 - the liquid colour is laid down on a PVC support until it is shaped as desired, then the drying phase starts to stabilise the matter. Layer after layer, the colour turns into a film and solidifies through stratification.
From the offcuts of this work and others, Cascami (Off Cuts) is produced. The piece is formed of numerous fragments of colour pressed together and then collected in a box where, after having been squeezed for several months, these strips create a somewhat dense block. Cascami is another representation of a non-place where materials and forms are blurred. Bidimensional textures become tridimensional and liquid material shapes as solid.

The two aspects finally coalesce in Assenza / Essenza (Absence / Essence), where the homonymous work sublimates the gesture of stratification and the traces of the journey it leaves behind. Here the artist keeps using nylon panels as a work surface, but once the layers of colour become a compact material sheet, she later removes them to reveal the final artwork.
In this cycle of works, the composition is also enriched by the signs left in the atelier from the previous works. From their footprint, the ghosts of past artworks find their position in space by being incorporated into a new work.

Throughout 2022, Trevisan's research evolves on an independence of the material not only from its support, but also from its past. The layered colour finally becomes sculptural in a metaphysical evolution and material sublimation. In Camera con Vista (Room with a View) the viewer is guided to discover the depth of alchemic sublimation through a sort of bewilderment, whilst being led to find himself in a dimension of nothingness and emptiness, within and outside the material, which is its own immanent and temporary place. 

Through a methodical and coherent research of exploration of space and matter, Eva Chiara Trevisan’s artworks transmute paintings into sculptures, on a pictoric surface which recalls the materiality of Expressionist paintings. The colour - disengaged by its support and free of any other figurative elements - is the only focal point of the viewer’s introspection, fulfilling the artist’s deepest desire of taking the viewer to a place where memory emerges slowly and intermittently, leaving unclear thoughts and feelings.