Paintings

Although Astri Reusch is best known for her painstakingly constructed works in such “hard” media as glass and metal and for large-scale public installations using stone and concrete, she began exploring the expressive possibilities of painting as a more immediate medium in the 1990s.

The VANISHING Forest, Environmental Series Paintings

She created this series of more than 200 paintings over a period starting in the 1990s until the early 2000s. She intended them to immerse the viewer in imagery of the vigorous vegetation and exuberant growth of the tropical rain forest, expressing the strength and positive force of nature. In her case, these works also represent a return to the world of the tropics in British Guiana (now Guyana), where she was born and spent her early childhood. In her lifetime, she has observed the devastation of this planetary resource in visits to West Africa and Colombia, and these paintings reflect her awareness and concern with respect to this process.

She said that these works grew out of her desire to watch the images develop on the canvas as she painted in a quasi-hypnotic state until she was subsumed in a world of fantastic shapes and shadows, of light suffused through leaves in dazzling colours that reflect an emotional state rather than merely reproducing those of nature.

In 1998 the troupe Dance-cité invited her to create sets based on this series for the dance performance Bastringue/Bâtard at the Théatre du Monument National. The giant paintings that she created for this event, some of which measure over 6.5 meters in width, acted as both context and object. They created an immersive tropical environment, intended as a counterpoint to the hard-edge modern choreography and techno musical score in a dialogue with the dancers.

FRACTALS

Starting in the 2000s she began creating collages combining altered photos of her previous works in glass with paintings on canvas. The intention was to express the ways in which images of works created in one medium can be transformed to acquire a second life through various manipulations: repetition, changes in colour and/or texture, juxtaposition with other visual elements, etc. in this series, she used images of her earliest constructed geometric glass panels as well as her later cast glass anthropomorphic sculptures to create these complex collages.

SIGNALETIQUES

In the 2010s she began a series of paintings and collages using recognizable symbols and forms (e.g. arrows, circles, animal hides, tools, etc.) to express emotional states and conundrums. She combined these symbols with abstract backgrounds to create a series of compelling images.