Susana Enriquez: Painting music by Sasha Grishin

Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent Charles Baudelaire*

My first encounter with the work of the Mexican artist Susana Enriquez was in 2003 when she held an exhibition in Canberra that dealt with possible crossovers between the visual arts and music.

In her present body of work she has moved away from art inspired by music and memory to music translated into art. In this instance it has been realised in the form of quite a large number of acrylic paintings executed mainly on square 30 x 30 cm canvases, although some are of a larger format.

Susana has divided the orchestral instruments into their main sections and linked them with specific colours. Red with percussion, blue with strings and yellow with brass and woodwind instruments. The reasons for the particular colour associations with these specific instruments are never clearly articulated, although I assume that they are both cultural and intuitive. Then this theory of music as colour has been applied to the music of a number of composers including Enriquez, Stravinsky, Bartók and Debussy.

Enriquez’s paintings, for all of their didactic intent, are largely subsumed into a highly personal visual morphology, where vivid colours and bold gestural passages of paint speak not only of colour-music equivalents, but of the whole arena of performance. We are called to witness the marks made by the artist like explosions of energy and we see the traces of her physical responses to her encounters with music. While informed by the peculiarities of her colour theory and inspired by specific passages of music, she performs a series of lyrical digressions in bold colour on canvas.

“There is a correspondence between perfumes, colours and sounds” Charles Baudelaire

Sasha Grishin
Australian National University
2006