June 19 - July 12 2025
Wilma Tabacco, Sea Wrack, 2023, oil on linen, 92x123cm
I am not one and simple, but complex and many.
– Virginia Woolf
It’s a handsome studio in a converted former factory. All is well illuminated by an even southern light flooding through ample saw-tooth windows crossing the roof. What I see within testifies to self-discipline, to a workaholic. Fresh geometric paintings, and pieces in progress, hang around sheer white walls in a hall-size room. Several waist-high work benches topped with white Formica are positioned around the space, while upon them are painting materials and studio workbooks, some beginning to dog-ear through use.
Wilma Tabacco is evidently not one to relax in her workspace—the few seats are straight backed, firm, rather functional. There is no suggestion of leisure here, no comfy armchair or couch an artist might lounge in and unwind. Nor, unlike many studios, are there the alluring diversions of well-thumbed art books and glossy magazines scattered on tables or shelves. Instead, this interior emphatically speaks of an artist who paints, paints, paints, paints. And when she isn’t painting, she restlessly fills studio journals with gouache designs for potential canvases, oodles of them. As I’m making notes she picks up a workbook and shows me it, flicking through pages, each coloured configuration filling the page and dated in pencil, and she keeps going, leafing through scores of them, page after page after page, every design fresh, with geometry and colour scheme always changing. The same compositional format—flat frontal shapes layered over each other with a pale margin surround—is applied in paintings over on a side wall.
I recite some obvious questions... The visual ingredients for her compositions, where do they stem from? WT speaks of what catches her interest in daily life, then, correcting the thought, she switches to younger days, recalling what she now realises was her innate curiosity, small discoveries when growing up, explanations given by relatives when she asked, but then—so symptomatic of a visual artist—how she herself saw, the appearance of things encountered. Her words wander to the countryside, and she talks of a segment of land, dishevelled and going slightly wild. For as long as people thereabouts remember whenever you tried to dig it the spade eventually brought up from the soil something strange and slightly marvellous. A couple of unglazed pot shards, perhaps, or old cobblestones, a broken hydrocaust tile, maybe a chipped tile with a patterned glaze, or a small buckle, its metal green with age. When the child Wilma and her cousin puzzled about that hotchpotch of items scattered through earth beneath the everyday world, the grown ups said this was debris of human history. Because a Roman road ran here in provincial Italy, a traffic artery which over millennia carried endless loads of produce and freight, and many, many people.
Ideas branch into insights, WT outlining thoughts stemming from early experience and their visual implications. Pointing to several compositions, WT says she might take the hole in the ground with a buried antiquity partially exposed, then, in geometric terms, translate this into a possible painting. She also found stimulus for compositions when ancient items were shown in glass-topped vitrines at an archaeological museum. That display method ordered and geometricised each item—this was what fuelled the first exhibition of WT’s works I saw.
The artist steers us back to that first motif, a segment of bare land with archaeology beneath. In time the growing Wilma realised historical residue is layered. How, if it were possible to take an x-ray of the earth, we might glimpse deposits from the past, one layered beneath the next, like an accidental collage. This led her to imagine more paintings.
WT then reaches across the bench for a book on Siena Cathedral. My hands are busy jotting notes, so she opens it and, sliding the lavish volume before me, points to photographic illustrations of the duomo’s interior, talking of the intricate layering. She indicates details in the decorative schema, the positioning of carved images in the overarching structure. It takes an artist to appreciate this, to see and analyse, noticing higher systems in play. WT states rather bluntly how her mind is ticking over when scrutinising those great medieval and renaissance churches of Italy, attending to how geometry is used at several architectural levels. Pointing out a sculpted animal above which an ornate column twists upward, she talks of the church as a large integrated composition: how this consists in turn of a multitude of ever smaller subsidiary compositions, each integrated and complete in its own terms. Contemplating how they relate is for her so visually—and intellectually—fulfilling.
Then it strikes me: jargon-spouting art books and fad-fuelled magazines are absent from this studio. No contemporary theory here! When WT told me the exhibition’s title, Against the Tide, I assumed it linked to her 2023 show on encounters with Venice. Tide as historical change; Tide as people crowding a city, as tourism displacing native Venetians; and Tide also as environmental threat, those rising waters and Venice’s sinking foundations. Yet Tide can be the changing pressures felt by an artist, especially those demands of curatorial fashion. Everything in this studio shows Wilma Tabacco is against that Tide—seeing, thinking, making for her reasons, on her terms.
Looking up, WT gestures to a canvas in progress on which a loose web of green bars tilt across a pale pinkish field. They recall a misshapen grid. And she’s back at that mental picture of a Roman road again, part of a communications network with intersections and subsidiary tracks branching off, how those paths which people travelled might be plotted as a diagram. At some point in adulthood it occurred to Wilma when civilisations progress, forming large towns then cities, humanity relies on grids to gather communities. The urban grid as a means of physical organisation seems beyond cultural difference—we see this practice across northern Africa, in the Middle East and Persia, in Europe, throughout Asia, and in Central America. Even as she says this I’m looking at the gridded configuration made by paintings on the studio wall, and I recall previous exhibitions where WT used a similar approach for the hang.
Gesturing to other paintings around her studio, the artist talks of maps they allude to, how places visited may be evoked in diagram-like form. WT refers to the implicit geometry in everyday human use. There it is in maps of ruined Roman towns, of catacombs rambling beneath, and also diagrams of the Paris metro, London’s underground, Melbourne’s tramways, as well as countless tourist guides we all use when travelling. Besides, the artist adds, as societies become more sophisticated they use variants of geometric abstraction to order information. Running my eye around the works in this studio, I now detect visual echoes of the table, the bar graph, the line graph, perhaps the pie chart, or the Venn diagram, and the flow chart.
The conversation runs deep, yet the artist has refrained from offering an explanation of any painting here. Instead, we have rambled through visual stimulus, intellectual stimulus, and certain perceptual values connected with them, those links between art and cognition. Throughout Tabacco has talked of her creativity, what draws her eye, how it triggers her mind.
Dr Christopher Heathcote
Art Historian & Critic
