Yuta Strega

We do not enter the world of Yuta Strega by chance.

We don’t come out unscathed either…

This artist creates as she is. Her painted and sculpted work is accomplished in the extension of herself, totally engaged: by her body – powerfully, by her soul passionately, through her values, her questions, her rage for life.

By its delicacy, infinitely…

Yuta Strega carries within her the full meaning of life: her art carries the torch of

integrity, denounces injustice, affirms freedom of expression.

In her sculpted works, Le Chant, available in earthenware, gilded bronze, green bronze, traces the drama of Charlie Hebdo, a drama that is both individual and collective. It is, a cry at the top of our lungs, a full-throated alert for the women and men of this world. The porcelain feet, inseparable, ready to move, symbolize, as their title indicates, “Another way of walking”. The visual artist combines the delicacy of the material with the rough aspect of the subject, which she treats in a “non-finito » by exaggerating the imperfections of the skin, as if the streaks it used even in the support, were so many scars on these feet which translate the experience, the work and the dust of the roads…

Moreover, doubt contributes to the strength of the work: because in the extension of these feet with toes clenched on the raw block, we observe a corolla opening evoking both the leather of the worn shoe but also the shreds of flesh of the skinned…

This particularly expressive process reflects the anchoring to the ground, so dear to the artist, and we reveal it has always inhabited by the need to draw from the earth, the roots of creativity. It is with passion that she cultivates her gardens in each region where she has lived – in the maritime lands of Var or in the hilly lands of

Aveyron. She likes more than anything,  to feed on her own crops and contemplate the flowers sown by her own hands and which she sees reborn each season… Her entire work is a hymn to nature, Because it is from this deep anchoring, from this Epicurean enjoyment of life that Yuta Strega accesses the metaphysical dimensions which

nourish the soul.

In the “ Fatum Hominis ” which expresses the suffering of the war in Gaza, on a column mistreated by the torments of life, the eyeless face never stops getting up.

The androgynous character, Seehandel or Sea-Trade, with lower limbs froz en in one tree trunk, presents itself to us gaunt, asymmetrical, dented. This marble powder sculpture, currently on display in Frankfurt -Paulskirche, a mecca of democracy in Germany, evokes the allegorical figures of the old Stock Exchange of this city having

survived the Second World War, with the exception of the Seehandel figure, made by the sculptor Schmidt von Launitz, which was destroyed. Seehandel reminds us of the brevity of our passage on earth, and the weight of the sea that he carries on his back. The net of blue color dripping from the shoulder suggests both sea and blood: a sea

often agitated, polluted by the global traffic of goods which takes place there; the blood, that of refugees “ used like toys in the movement of the waves”.

However, Seehandel rises with dignity in an imposing verticality…The face stretches proudly, the eyes stretch towards the sky while the mouth outlines a smile of hope…

Yuta Strega delivers her messages to “half-ills”, which ends up making them deafening… “Art must be a whistleblower,” she asserts, “a necessary witness which shows men how far they can no longer go.”

And what does it matter if the sculptures that spring from her hands appear unfinished.Or would it not be precisely this unfinished business, – at the confluence of a Rodin, of a Germaine Richier or aGiacometti-, this aesthetic harshness steeped in essentials which gives all the poetic force to the sculpted work?

Tireless person, endowed with formidable work force, rigor and demands, she always explores further, a sort of globetrotter of the artistic world, curious, without constantly in search of new experiences. After painting, sculpture. After color, black and white. After the oil, polish. When we think she has arrived at a port, she sets sail again… without taking her eyes off the beacon of integrity that guides her and watches over

her. With the bright hope of a better world.

Yuta Strega has been practicing simultaneously since his student yea rs at the School of Fine Arts of Frankfurt, watercolour, drawing, pastels, charcoal, oil painting, sculpture…

It is from Greek Antiquity that she recently draws her experience of encaustic – the Hot melted wax serves as a binder for mixing colours. She creates with this rediscovered, new paintings, – the support of which will no longer be linen canvas as with all its frames, but beech wood. She develops new patinas for his sculptures, including the Seehandel.

If we listen to our artist, nothing good is created if we don’t take the trouble to go see on the side of the Masters of the past. No modernity without looking towards the Ancients. No creation without transmission. Because how can we transgress a tradition if it is unknown to us? It’s about knowing how to observe, exploring museums and exhibitions to cultivate look and experience emotions directly with the works of the past.

His artistic culture is as vast as the imagination into which his work transports us. artwork. If the Fayoum Portraits gave rise to his attraction to encaustic, it was the artists of the Cinquecento – Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, who inspire his meaning of construction, the play of drapes or the captivating charm of sfumato… Goya then Rembrandt fascinated her for his mastery of shadow and light; Cézanne for the setting at a distance from the subject, Matisse for his backgrounds and his open windows. At Bram Van Velde, Gorky, Hans Hartung, De Kooning, Cy Twombly, she loves gestures, freedom pictorial associated with the strength of construction. In Jasper Johns, she sees talent dynamic and engaged in pop culture. More contemporary, Carrie Moyer seduces her with his cut-outs reminiscent of Matisse…Like her, all these creators have a lot to say, to transmit, to construct and to deconstruct, both at the level of technique and ideas. In substance as well as in form. THE (re)knowing is being able to found, with critical sense and awareness of his uniqueness, his identity as an artist in dialogue with his time.In sculpture as in painting, is the subject the subject? Or is it not rather a pretext for another, more subtle exploration?

This is the credo of Yuta Strega, who often quotes Milton Clark Avery (1885-1965) “The theme disappears to construct a table by and for its own values.

The subject is secondary, it is the background, the context in which it arises which matters: “From the moment we understood the importance of the background of a painting, she declares, the Mistral which comes in and out,

the music which results, we have understood all the poetry of our pictorial work.”

Music like singing, which it summons in its titles and which it invokes in its transmissions, holds a preponderant place

in his work: “everything is rhythm, everything is music in a composition.” Without forgetting dance, because

everything is movement in his work…

If we guess a form, it is to better free ourselves from it. The object is only the engine of a larger vision. When Yuta

Strega plays with the curved in his Opus Vitae, the jar takes birth; when she plays with the structures of the straight

line in the Concertos, it is an urban world that offers itself to our eyes – then disappears again to live his own life…

In the Translucent series, Yuta abandons color for a while, although it is very present and mastered in his painted work, to explore a more sober palette, of white, grey, black. By its title, the Translucent Fenestron could at invite us to focus on the small window in the upper right corner of the table. However, the female body that we divine opens in the offering of her spread legs, a much more essential window on the world, as Courbet did at another time…And while the Translucent Touching transports us into a barely figurative evocation – the time to perceive a face, an arm, a hand – we are taken far beyond: towards voluptuousness of an eternal Venice, where we will modestly remove clothing, while extending with the softness of the veils declined in the infinity of whites, the vibratory wave of a delicate touch … It is this same modesty, enhanced with a force of movement, which emanates from Translucent Vestis. Vague evocation of Woman at her Toilette by a Degas or a Bonnard, the modernity of the treatment where the vigor of the movement flirts with gradients of tones of grey, evokes the time of silent cinema or the sepia shots of a Man Ray… “Don’t freeze anything, leave openings for the viewer, leave openings for yourself” affirms the artist. Immediately reassured by its references, the gaze is lost in a more contemplative vast… Windows open to infinity, make one dizzy and always allow one to penetrate deeper inside ourselves, leaving us the absolute freedom of a possible relationship to reality, or the total intoxication of feeling which regenerates… Curves and straight lines seek each other out, respond to each other, intersect in a fiery ballet. The writing is multiple, just as much as the message delivered: scratches, scrapings, splatters, cracks, impasto, or transparencies, are the pictorial expressions of a creative power at the service of the great values of the soul: freedom, integrity. When, from the sacred space of her workshop, Yuta Strega enters the creative process, beware of anyone who ventures even a furtive passage behind her! … At the risk of interrupting the inspiration that animates it in mid-flight. It is in this state of absolute solitude and “inner necessity” dear to Kandinsky, that the artist will project his colors, spread them, superimpose them, make them vibrate in an energetic gestures. Then step back, interrupt himself to analyse, reflect, draw, start again. Time stops. Presence to oneself, urgency of the creative act. The connection with one’s deep self becomes the umbilical cord connected to the world in which it lives, to transmit to it the nutrients necessary for its survival: taking conscience, homage to nature, exhortation to peace. She will create with passion until the moment of grace which suspends the gesture. Then come exhaustion and absolute enjoyment. Sometimes doubt too. Because she knows she has never really finished. Since her first steps in creation, Yuta Strega has wandered on an intimate path where the gesture is liberating, where transgression like regression brings out the insides of the world, the best of herself. She is from the breed of those artists who will never sell their soul to the devil. Too rebellious, too conscious of her mission. We do not enter the world of Yuta Strega by chance. We don’t come out unscathed neither…   

Translation of the text of

Muriel Tisserant art historian

2023