Dreams of Art and Life
Lilly Wei

Exhilarating bursts of intense, riotous color and cornucopian abundance are some of what you see when you first view Teressa Valla's arresting, voluptuous paintings.  They are a kind of visual magic realism, a melange of the abstract and representational, the real and the fantastic merged and metamorphosed, the surfaces a tapestry of thick, sinuous skeins of color with areas of silken transparency.  The composition suggests surreal gardens and landscapes with figures tucked into them here and there, although the brushwork is a pleasure to parse in its own right, image and paint converging to create a latter-day version of Tropicalismo, say, the pop avant-garde Brazilian movement that included art, music, and literature.  Valla's paintings seem to sway to the Afro-Brazilian beat of Rio, the Latin jazz and salsa of Tito Puente, the haunting cante hondo of Andalusia and well as to an urban hubbub that's global.

Her images bloom with a fierce joie de vivre, her palette saturated with pure blues, greens, violets, yellows, reds—she is a whiz with reds—and the brilliance and opulence of gold, the synesthesia effect so strong that you can "hear" the tintinnabulation of the colors, the potency of the rhythms seem to make actual music, a phenomenon that Kandinsky and Rimbaud famously described—as did Oliver Sacks, the celebrated writer and neurologist.  Valla's titles are specific and convey their subjects and locales, from After a Walk in my Imagination (all of her work sited in the inventive mind), Imperial Vitality (Central Park) to Garcia Lorca Love (Andalusia in Spain) to Rio de Janeiro Canary Canopy (Brazil) stitching together geographies and genres as well as the urban and the pastoral, the latter emphasized by her use of pine needles.  Embedded in the paint for fragrance and texture—a paint so palpable you can still almost smell it, asserting its own material reality—they underscore the balancing of the illusionary and the real, which ultimately is what all art and life is about, isn't it?