ART INTERNATIONAL ZURICH 2004

Alicia Messing presented at ART INTERNATIONAL ZURICH 2004

ALICIA MESSING - LIFE POSTCARDS (TRANSLATION)

"If you cannot get me the first time don`t be disappointed.
When you do not find me in one place, look in another one.
I will stop in some place, waiting for you."
Walt Whitman

FROM ILONA SELMECZI

Having been surprisingly informed, via Internet, that she was invited as "special guest" to participate with several works at the 6th. Art Fair - International Art Zurich - next October 15,16 and 17 at the Kongresshaus of the Swiss city, confirms Alicia Messing the expression reached and validity of her work, elected as deserving referent of Argentine actual art.

Some of the selected paintings, that will be the "highlight" of the exhibition, that joins artists from 25 countries, are reproduced in this note. Alicia Messing oils - that has finally reached her career pinnacle and is, undoubtedly one of the most important argentine contemporary painters - however reflects a special freshness and purity, typical of an artist that undertakes the creative job with a hopeful and vital attitude, special character of who is young in spirit. Her personages are generally shown in ludic situations. There is always a small history to be developed. Sometimes perceptible at first sight and other not so obvious.

Thorough long years dedicated to painting Alicia Messing, disciple of Horacio Butler, which studio she left in 1967 and of Rodolfo Castagna's she also assisted to Hector Cartier's Vision classes, besides graduating herself as social psychologyst at Enrique Pichon Rivière school. Profession that has approached her much more to the interpretation of her pictorial meta message, adding to her work the face, the body, the dreams and desires, not necessarily her own, but at least near to our senses, and sensible to our way of feeling and interpretation.

In the art book that Banco Ciudad and the Recoleta Cultural Center edited when a retrospective exhibition of her works, shown in September of 1999, Professor Horacio Safons, art critic, President of the Argentina Art Critics Association and member of the "International Art Critics Association", affirmed, following Romero Brest, " that Alicia Messing, who knows the geometrical perspective, the art of tone graduation, the chiarioscuro, the composition rules etc. has besides 2 virtues that contribute to make her an artist: she does not use one line or color more than in the necessary measure to embody the expression and its sense, and she has such a monolithic conscience of the real as of the fantasy".

In 1968 she had her first individual exhibition at Van Riel Gallery and from then on in many galleries, museums and national and international exhibitions. Now, in ART INTERNATIONAL ZURICH invitations, among the 6 works there exhibited, there is one of the Argentina Alicia Messing. The place where she will exhibit her paintings will also be privileged, being just at the entrance to the Fair.

This recognition of her work and the treatment received, she will assist to the show accompanied by her husband, confirms A. Messing that there is a world where things are possible with recognition in spite of idiomatic differences, but where there is only one possible dialogue: that of the true value of artistic expression. Alicia Messing's works can be seen in different sites of Internet but specially in her own: http://www.amessing.mya.com.ar

ILONA SELMECZI, 2004 (Copyright)