The colour of Musik
Born in Zimbabwe, her youth spent between Israel and Paris, now living near Lausanne, Dessa has crossed many paths to achieve results in her painting. Her work blends transitions with upheavals from a nomad´s existence, nourished by her intense interior wealth.

Violent and generous, her work carries subterranean forces, like a long voyage into the heart of an intimate geography, sublimated through music, the artist´s source of inspiration: Powerful music: yesterday Mahler, today Messiaen which she interprets trough ever renewed abstraction, excessivley imaginative but also controlled. Thick strokes, dots, drippings and splashes clash and converge in luxurious colours, rhyming geometric light with a rich gestual narrative, to which the artist adds a language of signs here and there, like notes escaping from the musical score. The painting denies its format and its limits. The viewer feels seized, completely taken by the blues, greens, turquoise and emerald, rain pearls, thundering cascades, plunging waterfalls within innermost depths; or immersed into dark colouring enhanced by gold or blood suggested by other mouvements of "Turangalia", grottos, secret fissures cut into the deepest earth. Trough shades and forms that she extracts from the music, Dessa, with remarkable freedom of expression, enables one to feel the menacing storm, the ebb and flow of controlled emotion, the elaborate materials and the impelled gestures. Together with the storm, she presents the gentleness of her creative inspiration. Spontaneous, her paintings of various techniques intimately flow to the rhythm of the music, referring only to the unknown. Acryl and oil are used to explore a sort of personal mythology transcending the musical notes, which serve as a vehicle.
One could imagine Dessa´s painting repetitive, that one work would hold the key to all others. This would be misjudging the extraordinary wealth of her sensibility, perpetually condemned to new challenges, which summons her reaction to such pieces of music and the colours she paints. As in Lausanne, Paris and Bern, the work and demands of each exhibition arouse new and more complex strategies, paradoxially leading to a more evident reading. Far from the affected banality of fashions, Dessa has succeeded in defining the direct path of the passion residing within her. It is this passion to paint that she powerfully projects with large movement, in a perfectly achieved realisation. All that matters is the transformation of the music and colours, reflecting both the silence and roar of extraordinary inner echos.

Simon Vermot