The term ‘gestural’ crops up a lot when talking about painting; especially abstract or expressionist painting. It implies something spontaneous and reactive, perhaps even defiantly unreflective. However, Daniela Cristallo’s is a practice rooted firmly in experience and rumination. What does come through in these eight pieces (including two sculptural works) on view at Straitjacket in Broadmeadow, Newcastle, is the essential role of process. The working and re-working; the finessing. This is apparent in pieces like Barefaced Sun and Sow, which present as a build up of captured moments. Our attention is drawn to this process, rather than a ‘finished’ or complete product. Cristallo says that ‘I allow the work to develop of its own accord which is paramount to the process’. With these works, time as well as material are layered.

The titles seem to have been arrived at, as different moments after the fact, and the whole suggests a discursive, broken up narrative, like memory itself. These works seem suspended in the moment. Blurring and mixing up time and memory like this goes back at least as far as the Cubists, even though Cristallo is not in that tradition herself. The allusions are much more towards the internal world and memory. Looking at them they appear to be eavesdropping on an inner monologue, snatches of a conversation, and as such they have no obvious beginning or end. The titles are poetic, almost drifting away from the works at a tangent.

There is of course a spiritual dimension to all this; Cristallo says ‘there is something much bigger than myself out here, which allows me to explore my direction into abstraction.’ This statement reminds me of Rothko, whose floating colour fields, albeit on a grander scale, were created to evoke the same kinds of sublime reactions. Cristallo says she wants to convey ‘the feeling of being within the space’ and these works offer a moment of reflection. They are shown in an alcove slightly off from the main exhibition space, a little like a side chapel. Cristallo’s work is on a very human, intimate scale, more akin to devotional paintings and objects, and in this regard the spiritual is something evoked from within.

The two sculptural works, Holding Her Bare and Anchor in Shifting Tides, exemplify particularly this emphasis on materiality within the practice. The first is made from mulberry fibre and paper stiffened with wax. The second with cotton on a salvaged wood base. The fabric is stiffened here too, giving it a cave-like structure. In each case soft, flimsy materials have been given strength and structure through their treatment with the other substances. Circumstances, outside additions, give strength even to the softest and most yielding of materials. Ruminations about strength, endurance, resilience, persistence - run throughout the practice. Cristallo takes apparently unassuming materials, applies a seemingly light touch in the form by, for example, applying a coating, and in so doing transforms the dynamic of the material. She succeeds in capturing fleeting moments, in a fluid state of suspension. The palate is apparently subdued, but again it is this lightness of touch and these buildups of moments that make her practice stand out. This is work which demands a close-up engagement and consideration, and its rewards are subtle but enlightening.

Matthew Crookes 2025