The bird starts with a thrust and lifts itself. The process of Trek takes flight from a neutral state of calmness and slow rhythm enough to ride in the phantasmagoria of anima, or spirit. The anima allows him a proneness to flow. Like the stream, the characters to Trek’s paintings gushes out. He speaks of it as in an altered state, allowing him to traverse into a narrative of the real and unrealistic world where his imagination is the most active, recalling into mind 'childhood fantasies, snippets of daily life, space travel, getting lost in the wilderness and landscapes'
The bird flaps its wings and soars. Like the proverbial wind beneath the wings, the artist is deeply inspired by the mystic William Blake in which his yearning for the unknown that is outside the realm of the human mind validates itself through an occurrence of believers all throughout the fields of literature, music and history. The spiritual experience in the process of painting of Trek was heavily influenced by the allegorical artist Caspar David Friedrich having gained a wide popularity in a landscape composition called the Tetschen Altar, containing within itself a myriad of symbolisms in faith and hope. The existence of this work is a significant magnifier to the process of Trek Valdizno as if he is putting his faith onto the canvas, speaking of the act of painting as his holiest state.
The flight maintains its course. He starts with the background colors, mixes paint like in the chore of cooking, using a spatula with both hands to scoop paint from the canvas itself, mixes, divides, then spreads achieving a cut-out effect due to an abundance of techniques layered unto each other including marbling, conjoining, colliding, coiling, coagulating, scraping and skidding. An involuntary sleight of hand allows him to paint enchantment on canvas. The paintings declaring themselves as manifestations of the magnanimity of nature which the artist wholly surrenders to. His choice of background are earth-tones, subdued colors that beset the playground on which he paints his forms.
The artist's visual vocabulary is a result of an influx of information, averting materialism and returning back to natural forms, looking into the landscapes as his most default surrounding. Heavyset abstract images of birds pervade his oeuvre. The works Top Knot, The Quil, Altitude and Pinion are composed of thin, trickling, brush strokes that mimic the beak of the birds swooping unto the ocean, leaving a trail of circular waters in its wake. The upward motion of the brushstrokes in Starling present a height of regality. The minimal characteristic in nature is seen in the painting of Crest and Plumage. Both are made up of two strokes depicting a stem-like element seemingly budding in no time. The swaying of the branches of the strokes in Odille represent gentleness and formidability, the epitome of belief in nature in Trek's paintings.
In the right direction. Abstraction is non-objective. There are no exact images and there are no figures in sight. Trek's paintings give exactly that but with each stroke, he manages to compose forms of the flora and fauna as he experiences the act of painting. The artist believes that there are 'probably no precise meanings only precise experiences'. It is imperative that we call into mind Buddhism as the artist's inspiration to make sense of his conclusion. There is a famous Buddhist saying that everyone appears as buddhas in the eyes of the Buddha and everyone appears as pigs in the eyes of a pig. It suggests that the world is experienced according to the state of one's mind.
Trek's abstraction is a reflection of his personal awakening, of what he believes is his greatest form of meditation, of being one with the universe and grounding himself first in nature.
Landing. The birds flutter in from one place to another. The images are fleeting moments of nature caught in time just as it is the same with artist's process of painting where his ideas are just momentary, often altered or evolved into its final form.
The anima disrupts the monotony of life. It soars, for a little while. It lands, in a new location.