Catalog Essay for Transcending Bodies
Photo Credit: Paul Takeuchi
Triada Samaras, Fragmented Exultations
Patricia Miranda
Triada Samaras- the artist and the work - is full of righteous fury. In Samaras’ world, epic narratives emerge from the intimacy of personal illness and bodily fragility. The exhibition, Transcending Bodies, includes paintings from several recent series. The Long Covid Series presents a lamentation on the isolation and resilience of negotiating chronic illness, especially one so fraught with political context. Her palette of blacks, smoky umbers, and dirty whites is applied in ferocious strokes of somber earthiness. An occasional dense cadmium red or yellow punches the space; this is a dusk world drained of fecund greenery. Hearts, hands, and torsos appear disembodied from swirls of shadow. They become iconic, body parts as talismanic ex-votos. They circle a vortex in the pictorial space as though falling backwards into oblivion, threatening to reach into our world to pull us with them. Their plea to not fall spills the inky black world onto the sides of the canvas, breaking the fourth wall of their interiority.
The Unbound Series continues the iconography of visceral brushwork and tumultuous emotions. Yet forms are no longer fragmented in inchoate darkness – hints of landscape appear, leaning closer into illusion. Figures have an earnest naivete; a body traced onto the canvas is swaddled in a surround of paint, symbolic houses swirl through a flooded subconscious storm dream. Clouds of loosely scripted poetry encircle the images like sirens recounting the story. Objects materialize, windswept, mythic, wrestling between the void and the luminous.
In the Body and Nature Series, darkness has given way to a dawn of bright blues, pinks and yellows. The brushwork remains agitated, full of the struggle and longing present in all of the artist’s work. These sunrise landscapes are smaller, quieter, almost jubilant. A horizon appears across the series, gravity calming the vortex, as a hand reaches hopefully into the distant light.
The exhibition embodies a cycle of seasons, a woman’s private story of illness and healing. There’s a persistent spirituality to Samaras’ work, a sense of the pain, awe, and transcendence of suffering, and the ability of paint to illuminate the visceral. Subsuming larger religious and societal themes into the particularity of a woman with an “unacceptable” chronic illness, her sense of atmosphere references Goya in his dark moody politic. The urgency of her touch and elasticity of her forms, as well as her tactile religiosity, bring to mind El Greco, the icon writer turned fleshy painter, perhaps an unconscious nod to her Greek heritage. Samaras exults in the expressive and tempestuous emotionality of paint.
Patricia Miranda July 2025
