Torontonian artist Tina Dadouch creates patterns out of familiar items to achieve beautiful, shifting networks of volume and color. As she phrases it, her acrylic paintings “manipulate objects to create abstraction.” The figurative items she depicts, often vessels for liquids like cups and carafes, quickly fade from view as she repeats them with seemingly infinite variations in color, shading and line. The resulting grids of fauvist tones feature bright gradients and incredible juxtapositions, like warm oranges and yellows set against deep blues.
Her unique way of rendering a figurative image abstract through sensitive repetition and variation recalls the French modernist Fernand Léger’s progression away from representation. But Dadouch creates this effect in each of her compositions, drawing viewers’ attention with a recognizable object before systematically breaking that item down into a playful arrangement of contours and brushstrokes with infinite possibilities for alteration. By making the figurative purely formal, Dadouch’s bright, lively compositions train viewers’ eyes to see differently.