In her acrylic on canvas paintings of everyday objects, Argentine artist Susana Bergero transforms the familiar into something extraordinary. Plates, teapots, flowers, and animals are imbued with a sense of fantasy and wonder in these works that feature layers of enigmatic imagery. Indeed, in these paintings rich in symbolism, the artist explores pleasure, suffering, desire, happiness, and guilt via seemingly banal remnants of quotidian life. With a restrained palette and diverse compositional arrangements, Bergero combines memories of images, books, and personal encounters and transmutes them into pictures that provoke questions without ever revealing answers.
In works such as Plato Reverso, Bergero paints simple objects but from an unusual and abstracted perspective. The underside of a plate is identifiable only through the inscription, “Made in China,” that decorates the center of the golden composition. In her painting titled Torre, the artist depicts a precariously stacked tower of teacups. The wares are overlapping and layered to create an abstracted picture in which everyday objects become unusual, mythical, and surreal.
