The interrelated questions of theme, emotion, and symbology constitute the cornerstones of Venezuelan critic Víctor Guédez’s text “Las flores de Teresa Gabaldón,” the introduction to the catalogue for the exhibition Calix of the painter that was held in Caracas in May 1991. For Guédez, Teresa Gabaldón (b. 1950) makes use of flowers as a reference to reality in order to express, chiefly by means of color and the treatment of the brushstroke, emotion in the painting. It is owing to this approach that Gabaldón’s painting avoids falling into the obvious despite usage of the commonplace flower theme. Indeed, tackling that theme is a sign of the artist’s willingness to take risks. Along these lines, Guédez cites Gregory Battcock when he says that art is novelty, and mysteriously, that the novel resides in the commonplace. The critic points out that Gabaldón’s background is in drawing, which is why her paintings have a calligraphic quality that is enmeshed with painterly elements. She manages to bring intuition, sensibility, and temperament together in a single discourse to give each painting an expressive subjectivity removed from naive realism or ethereal informalism. Guédez places emphasis on the fact that the symbolic possibilities of the flower theme are very diverse, indeed at times diametrical—for instance, considering the fresh and the withered. This means that the work engages the problem of harmony within dichotomy.
This text is particularly important since it is one of the few interpretations ever written of Gabaldón’s work.
For other critical texts on Teresa Gabaldón’s art, see “De lo efímero a lo eterno: Teresa Gabaldón expresa su fuerza interior” (ICAA digital archive doc. no. 1160423) by Yasmín Monsalve and “Recuperar la pintura en flores” by Roberto Guevara (doc. no. 1157872).