ALIVE WITH THE CHILD

WERIFESTERIA Zsuzsa Kollo

Colville Gallery

91A Salamanca Place Hobart Until Tuesday

Price range: $3800 — $7800

Werifesteria means to wander through a forest longingly in search of mystery. It is claimed to be a word from Old English, but this is contentious, it may be a much newer invention, and indeed not even a legitimate word. Correct or not, it’s a fine title for the lush delights of Zsuzsa Kollo’s paintings.

Viewing the world she delves into feels like a voyage to a place full of marvels. Kollo’s work is bursting with fecundity, in all senses of the word. It is filled with ideas, is marvellously fertile and has produced many children. All the works show little people of varying ages — from sleeping tots to lanky teens — and new life. They project an idea of spring and very certainly the feeling of rich potential.

Kollo’s painted children are robust and strong, their cheeks often ruddy and their limbs long. Yet they’re not sentimental. It’s not like the artist is idolising her own youth, it’s more that she is trying to capture all the explosive possibility a child could have.

There’s a subtle regal quality through all the works, with many of the subjects portrayed wearing bright crowns made of flowers and plants. There’s a symbolic language at work here that mixes new life with a suggestion of pagan symbolism in the petal-drenched headgear. This is enhanced by the appearance of some of the animals. Children are accompanied by sly foxes, which seem to have walked straight out of some kind of mythical tradition. There’s a suggestion that an old tradition is alive, fresh and renewed.

There’s more than the subjects at play though. Kollo also just seems to enjoy painting. There’s a sort of hyper-reality that almost bursts out of the works. Flowers rain colour in vibrant streaks and the backgrounds are filled with strong, flowing modulations of colour and form that have a rich, rippling quality. It’s all quite joyous in execution, but tempered with a serious commitment to the act of painting. Kollo is skilled with a brush and her ability to paint living things and make them burst with the vitality of life is notable.

Kollo’s work is aligned with the way she applies paint. She paints life and her painting is fresh and alive, filled with a juiciness that has just enough of a hint of strangeness to stop it collapsing into mawkish sentiment. There is a suggestion of something odd going on in many of the works, as if the child subjects know something you don’t. They stare back at the audience. They talk to animals and birds, and they make themselves crowns.