Thoma is interested in the physicality of painting in relation to ideas of movement, colour and space. She sees painting as dynamic process where the inertia of matter is ‘set in motion’ by the physical effort of moving paint across the canvas, where formlessness is ‘given direction’ — this might involve colour bands/lines as horizontal, linear vectors or in more recent works as a folding of colour space through curves and interwoven lines. Her abstract(ed) paintings are often developed as diptychs or triptychs to allow for complex colour constellations expanding into actual, architectural space. This has led to an on-going body of work, her ‘Lines of Light’ series including the series ‘White Lines’ and the more recent series ‘Folded Colour’.
As much as Thoma’s paintings are concrete in their abstract materiality, she considers them as virtual possibilities, incorporating the potential of (moving) representational images — abstraction in relation to virtual figuration. Movement (or its absence) is a key element in her work, so is the idea of montage where diverse image-components or panels are juxtaposed within a visual method or across different media.
Andrea Thoma 