CARMEN TOUZA

When introduced to Carmen Touza's paintings, I found it easy to succumb to the impressive beauty they capture. She has the power to draw her audience into magical private worlds projected through a feast of forms and colours.

… And, how attention-grabbing these spectacular paintings are! Ironically, they burst with disparate tones and hues, but harmonize pleasingly as complete works of art, each charged with emotions which couch the delicate sensitivity and sensual warmth of the artist. Often, the effect is of pictures within pictures contributing to an overarching vision, or of secret spaces awaiting discovery.

There are themes that run throughout this collection. However, due to their original content and Carmen Touza's ingenious style, each creation is a brave, optimistic individual, diffusing very different effects and moods- often fantastical. Also interesting, is that while her paintings are expansive, and yet replete with detail, they give the impression of being the fruit of spontaneous expression, which, admits Carmen, "… is a valid observation, because I paint quickly, with fervour and only under inspiration."

What leading Spanish painter and fellow expositor Carlos Modesto finds most fascinating about Carmen´s genius is her technique. Though she applies layer across layer of paint with seeming ease, it is the strategic way textures and colours filter into view from the canvas which gives the seductive depth and body to the forms characteristic of her style.

You will notice how her works never finish at the edge of the canvas, but continue around the sides; and so they should never be framed.

Be prepared. This collection of paintings will oblige you to participate directly in their magic! The Empty Room isn't really empty at all because the lush seats in the painting seem to jump out at the viewer and invite him to sit down in them, and thus, the room is no longer empty. In A Garden by the Sea, there are any number of ways to enter into its enchantment. One is beckoned to step into the garden to discover within the painting itself what it will cause to spring to the imagination. In A Lady's Private Moment, the lady is clearly caught up, almost rapturously, in a moment of personal reflection, but somehow she will manage to seduce you to share her thoughts.

Are the lone ladies featured in many of these paintings an indirect reflection of Carmen Touza, the artist? "Maybe, maybe not!" responds Carmen coquettishly. And so, the question of how much of herself she has deposited in them, remains teasingly open. That said, one thing is for sure. This collection of fabulous creations not only invites, but cries out for you, the observer, to interact with them and to form part of their meanings.

Yesteryear, even before Carmen Touza's work became so sought after, the revenue gained from selling her paintings was the bread-and-butter money which allowed the artist to give her children an upbringing and get them through university. Now, living alone in a well-sunlit, sixth-floor apartment, with panoramic views across Pontevedra, she has more time to dedicate to what she most loves doing - her raison d'être: PAINTING.

by Stephen M. Hill, British poet