<B>Ongoing love-story</B>

Stina Spangenberg Bécherel is no newcomer to the Mauritian artistic scene. Since she landed with her suitcases and paintbrushes 40 years ago, far from her native Sweden, she has shone as an artist of unique vision and talent. But most of her works are in private collections.

Baie-du-Tombeau in the sixties: the place was surely less alive with cars and shops than it is today. It was a time when coastal roads looked more like sandy paths , undefinedly stretching away to the shore. Yet, Baie-du-Tombeau had a charm of its own, with the gentle lilt of the sea breeze, the nearby rumble of the port… The painter could not ask for more, and had no reason to go further for inspiration.

And so it was for Stina Spangenberg, who became Stina Spangenberg Bécherel on marrying a Mauritian. The Swedish-born artist had“always been attracted by exotic lands”. In her family, this eagerness was as natural as painting, rambling, corresponding, or dancing. However, Stina went as far as earning her living with her delicate paintbrush. “There is nothing extraordinary about it. Children are also good painters”, she comments, with a malicious smile.

Like all genuine artists, she has her contradictions, and seems always confronted by some sort of anguish. Nevertheless, this concern rarely pervades her paintings, which are characterized by soothing open sea tones, except through her meticulousness, which recalls Venetian lace.

She displays a very down-to-earth attitude when she criticises the lack of civic responsibility on our roads. Yet, the world she displays on canvas is like a cut-off from the noisy crowd. Alone in her studio, she summons the colours, lights and shapes of nature, and the wealth lying beneath. The result is sometimes formally abstract, but it still inspires the imagination most powerfully.

Fantastic landscapes, unspoken of, are so familiar to her. Like those of Vincent van Gogh, they sometimes seem to be characters in themselves. Progressively, they have almost replaced the figurative representations of her early years. “These are naïve art ”, she comments on the latter. But even there, elements of strangeness catch the surprised eye, whether in a scene of daily life, spiritedly staged, or her vision of Corps de Garde mountain, standing sadly against a bleak doomed sky.

Stina Spangenberg Bécherel has never stopped painting. And estimates of her total production assign to her more than 300 works. Much was sold to private collectors or to museums. Thanks to the Blue Penny Museum, which is devoting an entire retrospective exhibition to her until the 6th of August, 34 works, selected from each of her creative periods, help us to rediscover her singular art.

Sometimes, it definitely takes flight from the real world, finding renewed strength in the landscape of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. “For me art is something that is boundless. One comes to it as a child does, free and fresh,” she says. And this is what the visitor feels on leaving this exhibition.

After all, the horizon from Baie-du-Tombeau never ends either...

● Thanks to the Blue Penny Museum, a retrospective exhibition of her creative itinerary can be viewed until August 6.

<B>Jake NICHOLSON</B>