The Galería Tomás March shows from February 28th the latest works by dutch artist Tanja Smit Voorburg (1961). This is her second exhibition in Valencia where our gallery last exhibited her work in May 1999. Since that show, Tanja Smit has had solo shows in Holland at Maurits van de Laar Gallery(1999), at Luxus Proyectruimte(2001) and at Galería Alter Ego, Barcelona (2002), as well as many group shows in Holland and Spain.

“To play hide and seek, one person must first shut his eyes and count to 100. Meanwhile, the others in the game hide. After counting, the seeking begins: the seeker is apparently alone, yet he also knows the others are there. The work of Tanja Smit moves within this space of seeking and revelation, a space in which the artist generates new realities.

In her painting there is a repetition of allegorical archetypes that can be named, forms used for their mythic nature, such as 'horseman', 'horse', 'woman', 'man', 'goat', 'monkey', 'boat', that seem to correspond, voluntarily or involuntarily, to cultural and mythological stereotypes. These figurative forms are the representation of ideas and thoughts, of mental images that lose their narrative quality upon mixing, without hierarchical order, with abstract and geometric forms. The logic of a single interpretation is thus broken. Joining these elements are lines, loose strokes that connect forms and ideas in a free, unconscious manner in order to convert thoughts into images in the most direct possible way.

Her pieces thereby acquire an almost dreamlike quality, becoming transformed into mental and ideal spaces which, despite being non-narrative, continue to have a strong relationship with the world of word-based fiction. The conscious and unconscious alternate, a succession of the automatic and the intentional, the hidden and the shown. The superimposition of images, with the creation, by way of loose strokes, of layers that cover earlier strata, reveals the working process. The use of colour - warm and transparent colours - fill the canvases with a melancholic happiness, of children's games recovered by adults.

All of the freedom of strokes and content that Smit applies to her canvases is turned around in a playful yet regulated way in her 'prints', the pieces she makes on newspaper cuttings, books and telephone listings. In these pieces, the artist intervenes in texts, both looking for and hiding meanings to find other ones.

In an almost automatic, unconscious way, Tanja Smit establishes rules that determine her intervention in the text. Actually,the freedom of the stroke and the idea manifested in painting is subverted here. These rules may develop simply out of orthographic concerns (for example, uniting all of the letters 'e' with a slash), for reasons of graphic design (filling in the blank spaces between words), phonetic motives (isolating specific sounds) or even according to the content and meaning of the words (searching for adjectives and treating them differently depending on whether their meaning is positive or negative).

In each of these pieces, different aspects of language are highlighted while others are hidden. Language is here also a very important part of the creative process; its different aspects are analysed in a play between formal content and the physical features of the same.

Other elements of Tanja Smit's pictorial work are also found in the prints. Formal elements, such as geometric forms and strokes that join ideas, are present. There are aspects that even reinforce one another, such as a certain musical quality to the pictorial work, an almost intangible but pervasive quality in all of her paintings, which in the prints is clearly represented by the aspect of musical score that many of them acquire. The non-meaning that guides the action seems to result in a meaning which, examined closely, is deceiving, is a lie.

The same alternating between conscious and unconscious is visible in both types of work: how through an obsessive and meditative activity it is possible, in changing the form, to also change the meaning. In the works on paper, the mechanical action of the hand, which is relaxed and works almost free of the mind, is both playful and at the same time an attempt to understand, to search for hidden truths and create new ones.

This playful and de-constructive game, allows Smit to express the hybrid layers through which the world presents itself, to deepen her search for the authenticity of ideas and communicate this in a body of work which demands an active eye on the part of the viewer. It is work offered to the public so that the viewer may participate in the game proposed by the artist.”

Anna Guarro