Schattenlinie

No single term could depict Comellas’ work: she builds, paints, takes photographs, and makes collages. How can her work be described, though? How does she proceed?

First she builds a frame, a wooden substructure, a Plexiglas base – an individually formed body. And a body it is, no simple carrier of the image. Her craftsmanship even includes bookbinding, when she decides to bind colored pages and hang them on the wall as objects of regard. After the frame is covered, the book is bound, work on the plane sets in, or precisely: on the planes. We find a behind, above, beyond – a layering of materials and colors.The use of Japanese paper, silky, diaphanous, testifies to Comellas’ great affinity for the Asian isles she knows from travels. Transparent sediments are carried onto the surface of the work until a cosmos stands before us that bears witness to the first days of Genesis: water, land, clouds or stars.

The colors she appliescould not seem more elementary: we stand before blue, red or green. Colors that speak to the observer in a very direct and sensual way, alluding to water, sky, fire, warmth, vegetation.(...) reminiscent of rain showers like the one quoted in the work “Sudden rain over Atake”. Or the color sprawls like moss, blazes like flames. The poetic titles – partly taken from a novel – accentuate this tension between real matter, i.e. color, paper, canvas, and alluded matter as in the photographs of water or stone.

Comellas succeeds in keeping a miraculous balance between image and abstraction. Her works are complex. They reveal themselves to the viewer in a mixture of points of observation from careful close ups to sweeping views at various angles as one moves along the work.

Miriam Halwani