From her portraits of family, friends and commissions, through to her prolific landscape paintings and most recent semi-abstract works, Alina’s paintings are imbued with dedication to color. Endlessly versatile and at the core of her practice, lies her keen interest in material experimentation. Mixing oils, acrylics and crayons with plaster, glazes and collage, working with glass and ceramic tiles and transferring her painterly images into large-scale murals, her style incorporates a broad range of sources.
Her landscape series depicting olive trees in full spring flowers, their branches dense with blossom, attain an almost surreal and idealistic pleasure. Alina uses flat areas of color and texture to orchestrate her landscapes and builds distinct spaces and patterns. Although her imagery is sometimes inspired from photographs and past memories, her color palette renders the landscape contemporary and eternal.
This momentum, also infiltrates her portrait series. Matsa has always been interested in representing the places and people around her, freezing moments in time and capturing her subject’s true essence.
In her recent body of work her painterly language moves towards abstraction and the use of color and mediums becomes all the more experimental. Vivid flowing blocks of translucent color are combined here in a seductive way. The new work is instilled with feelings of playfulness and joy. Motivated by an ever-present optimism, the paintings invite us to escape in a world of pleasure and hope, her personal dreamland.