VERONICA GREEN
Veronica Green (1984) is a young New Zealand artist with a mixture of Italian and polish nationality, who is recognized as an evolutionary in the world of abstract figurative art. With the completion of a Fine Arts Honours Degree at Massey University, majoring in Toi Atea: contemporary Maori art and Design she then moved to Venice in which her career took off and her world of the fantastic, mistled its magic into the realm of contemporary art.
Dense and bright colours, shiny materials and a pinch of fluorescent paint, these are the ingredients that allow the New Zealand artist Veronica Green to open up to us the doors of her enchanted world. Once immersed in this magical universe, the symbolic elements and thus the many cultural references will show us the way to decode reality. A cocktail of cultures coexists in her canvases as in her personal life: Veronica Green now lives and works in Venice, but was born in 1984 in New Zealand to an Italian mother and a Polish father. If disentangling from the different cultures that make up our society is a very complex process in itself, the contemporary globalized world further enriches this cultural background of rooted traditions. In particular, with the development of the new media (television, cinema and the Internet), a global cultural revolution occurred during the last sixty years, where various populations have become increasingly closer and mixed, and where a common popular culture has emerged.
In her works, Veronica Green succeeds in synthetizing this lively cocktail of references spectacularly, integrating them into her personal life. Her works are thus developed on different levels both as regards the interpretation of her work and its formal development. By day, natural areas represented cast us into haunting and deceptive landscapes, taking us to a magical and seductive world.
The colours appear, disappear, slide, and the ways forward are varied; but instead of taking us to our destination, they make us bounce on a new unstable and fluctuating ground. The characters of fairy tales or cartoons that inhabit her paintings seem to be the only ones who know the geography and lush maze of these places. Each figurative element, however, has a very precise allegorical function. It may in fact represent a concept or situation: freedom, strength, motherhood, guilt, glamor, travel, risk, etc. These symbols therefore also allow viewers to find their own way. And when night falls, a starry sky emerges from every canvas, introducing another painting that will light the way in times of darkness. So using a symbolic language similar to what we find in the world of fairy tales, the artist speaks of values and culture. Playing with collective imagination, familiar and comfortable, she takes us to places where we have all been to, but that, as adults, we visit no more.