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The pleasures of the city are many. In New York the buildings and bridges are so high that the experience is magnified ... In the middle of this sensory overload, one can become very intimate with the comfort afforded by colour and form. The infinite range of intensities offered by design, and our individual magnetic responses to different shapes and hues, are an endless mystery. I am of the opinion that subjectivity is too complicated and heterogeneous for these mysteries to be revealed or explicated through language. Regardless, colour and form serve a daily purpose, as artist Diena Georgetti describes:

I have a need for graphics. I often leave packaging by Comme des Garcons, Aesop, Miu Miu, Prada, Dolce&Gabbana, etc. around. They function as a clear boast of colour and form to the less defined elements of life ...

When Georgetti began to explore the palliative qualities of an abstracted vocabulary of colour and form, her forays were tentative and delicate. These qualities can still be said to characterise her art, but her paintings of the last five years reveal a more confident use of therapeutic abstract forms. The central motif of The in residence /courtyard with embellished cabinetry parallel to street, 2008, consists of an overlaid triangle and circle, their geometries divided by a breakdown of brown, cream, black and red. Although entirely Georgetti's own, this form could well have come from the paintings of Klint, a Swedish mystic and early abstract painter who, as previously mentioned, was a close follower of Steiner's teachings. The different abstract experiments developed in Georgetti's more recent work involve greater compositional complexity and reveal a remarkable sampling of abstract modes. The artist describes how she collects these different examples of art and re-purposes them for her own use:

These paintings are both geometric and figural at once, as each is of equal value. I collect these and even though it hurts, they can never be mine. So I take what I can get away with - a section, a composition, a colourway - until I am satisfied that I have somehow contributed to them, and them somehow to me.

Georgetti's inspirations extend from the classical modernism of Kandinsky and Fernand Leger to recent abstract works by artists including Josh Smith and Sam Rountree-Williams. The works of these different artists assist Georgetti in the construction of her therapeutic strategies, her compositions for universal catharsis and pathos. The location of the source in historical lineage is not of particular relevance. It is the therapeutic intensity that is of greatest concern ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Autumn 2010 issue.