Si encontré al mundo gris, suegra, en mi carta de marzo de 2008, hoy es sencillamente negro el futuro a cinco años.
¿Por qué? Porque no tenemos la perspicacia para darnos cuenta de lo que está pasando alrededor de nosotros.
Todos marchamos hacia la debacle más rotunda de nuestras vidas con los ojos puestos en las panaceas del pasado: en el cincuentenario del Festival de Viña, los premios Oscar, el escote de tal, el trasero de la fulana.
Si ven tragedia, es al nivel sensiblero, acogiendo todo a nivel familiero, los quince minutos de llantos que merezcan el desenlace de una hija de ministro, o cualquier damnificado de un drama circunstancial ajeno. Ni los propios hijos reciben esta ola de lágrimas. La distancia máxima que alguien de hoy domina es la del ojo al ombligo.
Es por eso que no somos capaces de captar la profundidad de la crisis en que todos nosotros estamos enrollados – que por supuesto – va más allá de las simples dimensiones económicas y financieras de los titulares de los medios.
Tanta sensiblería para el desastre ajeno, tan poca sensatez a la ceguera de uno mismo.
Suegra, se termina un estilo de vida, un sistema de creencias, un modus operandi, tantas de las mil maneras de actuar que nos han sido comunes y cómodas. No se puede seguir creyendo en los mitos, no se puede confiar en las ilusiones, en los cuentos de hadas de los abuelos o los políticos...
Todo lo que hemos aprendido a los pies de los padres, en las instituciones educativas, de los manipuladores de las verdades, no nos sirve hoy para orientarnos para mañana.
Nada tiene que ver ni el neo-liberalismo, ni el capitalismo, ni el socialismo, o el comunismo. Tampoco la democracia ni el autoritarismo. Ni Díos ni el diablo. No hay donde echar la culpa más allá de uno mismo. Solo a uno mismo por no analizar lo que las cúpulas del poder nos vendieron, sea la familia, la escuela, la iglesia o el gobierno.
Aquí estamos, en el año 2009, con una profunda pérdida de fe en las instituciones que siempre nos sostenían en los malos momentos. No creemos nada en las palabras que nos ofrecen. Ya sabemos que sus actos son inútiles y sus promesas falsas.
Por eso vivimos sin valores, copiando el ejemplo del facilismo, envidiando a los más exitosos.
Tratamos de creer todo lo que leemos, todo lo que nos ofrecen como la verdad venidera. Casi todos nosotros preferimos creer: ¡es más fácil! El facilismo es el credo del momento… ‘Todo es relativo’, nos dicen.
Cuando te describí la situación actual de nuestro planeta hace un año, alguien podía haber dudado de la credibilidad de mis observaciones. Hoy, leyendo el texto de nuevo, veo que pequé por optimista.
La crisis ya está, aunque la mayoría la está tomando como un ajuste pasajero. Pueda ser que en Chile vaya a ser una catástrofe menor, pero en el corazón del mundo occidental va a ser un hecatombe. Imagina, suegra, ayer la prensa estadounidense habló de la nacionalización de los bancos en aquel país. Tal planteo es inimaginable para alguien que se nutre de los valores de su propio pasado. El Citibank, ese nuevo socio moribundo del Banco de Chile, está por desaparecer, junto con tantos otros.
Las grandes automotrices solo añoran una cómoda bancarrota donde los ejecutivos vuelvan a sus casas con millones y los obreros sindicales con lo que pueden rescatar de los restos. Los accionistas, como los de los bancos, se quedarán sin un centavo. ¡Jamás fue imaginable tal destino!
Todavía nadie lo cree, todos creen en la droga milagrosa que va a revertir la situación. El gobierno de Bush tiraba millones, centenares de ellos, para tapar huecos. El gobierno de Obama ofrece billones, hasta lo que se llaman trillones en EEUU, sin saber porque. Todo sin efecto. Cada semana la crisis corre por otro canal, cada semana lo que fue la solución de la semana anterior es el cálculo errado de hoy.
Hay una sencilla verdad: no hay ningún economista o político en el mundo que tenga la más mínima idea de cómo resolver el problema. Solo sabemos que cada nuevo proyecto va a beneficiar a muchos amigos del burócrata que lo inventa, y es eso lo suficiente para sus pares para apoyarlo. Aquí estamos, víctimas de avaricia e ignorancia institucional, de la gente que elegimos para gobernarnos.
Si todos los intentos, a veces bien intencionados, de los gobiernos, no sirven, ¿qué va a pasar? Es obvio. Nada bueno. Hemos entregado la resolución de nuestro futuro a una manga de incapaces, felices de tener la oportunidad de ejercer su poder a favor de sus cómplices.
No hay liderazgo, suegra, solo una clase de buscadores del poder. Los vemos todos los días en la televisión, en Chile, en EEUU, en China. Se juntan, discuten, hacen declaraciones, y el mundo sigue barranca abajo.
¿Qué nos viene? Pasamos ya en 2008 a la calamidad de la recesión y en 2009 entraremos en el desastre de la depresión. De allí, los países centrales pasarán a la hiper-inflación, a la necesidad de inventar una nueva moneda regente. El dólar y el euro van a ser recuerdos de ‘los viejos tiempos’. Será un proceso de unos cinco años, marcado también por debacles bélicas, brotes nucleares, luchas civiles, con un gran desastre detonadora a mitad de camino. ¿Suena feroz? Lo es.
Y ¿Por qué va a suceder? Porque la gente está programada para aceptarlo así. Cada guerrita es un paso a la próxima. Cada intervención de un poder extranjero en los asuntos de otro estado prepara el camino para la próxima. Cada país que crea que es el defensor del bien de los demás empuja al mundo hacia una nueva conflagración catastrófica. Solo hay que mirar a la tele para darse cuenta.
Nadie es capaz de ver o imaginar otra manera de resolver los conflictos. Es la programación que hemos recibido de nuestros padres, nuestros hermanos, nuestras escuelas, nuestras universidades, nuestros empleadores, nuestros líderes religiosos y políticos. No hay por donde pueda entrar un rayo de lucidez.
Cuando chicos, vemos con claridad. Los dibujos de chicos preescolares suelen tener magia, creatividad, desparpajo. Luego se van al colegio y pierden toda su gracia. Como una ventana cerca del mar, nuestra visión se tapa con capas salinas que disminuyen la visibilidad. Cada capa de conocimiento que incorporamos nos limita a actuar con claridad en el futuro. Nos llenan de miedos, prejuicios, dudas. Desaparece la posibilidad de discernir: vemos solo lo que nos enseñan a ver. Entendemos solo lo que nos enseñan a entender. Vemos todo por los filtros impuestos por el pasado.
Para solucionar problemas nuevos, hay que tener una visión renovadora. Pero hemos sido instruidos de otra manara: solo reaccionamos con la información que ya manejamos. Y solo hemos aprendido a aplicar las soluciones del pasado a los problemas del futuro.
Nuestra generación está condenada a sufrir las consecuencias y, peor, nuestros hijos están siendo inducidos a aprender de nosotros. ¡Que triste, no! Nadie contempló que haya que enseñar a los hijos a pensar, pensar con nuevos criterios, no con los trillados, los cómodos, los cuales que, a medias, nos han servido tanto tiempo.
Esta falta de creatividad, de compromiso con el futuro, hoy nos tiene prisionero. El gobierno de EEUU solo puede aplicar las políticas erróneas de debacles pasadas. Los padres iguales.
Nadie se detiene a ver como los procesos naturales, los ciclos inevitables de todos los tiempos, van resolviendo los problemas. Queremos una solución instantánea, como en el cine. Esperar es angustiante, inaceptable. Optamos por la actitud del avestruz, escondernos la cabeza hasta que el peligro se nos aparta.
Y así, querida suegra, será.
Después de una década abominable, tal vez, algún padre en algún lugar decidirá cambiar el enfoque de la formación de su hijo. Y otro, y otro. No va a venir de arriba, ni de la iglesia, ni del educador, ni del gobierno, sea neo-liberal, capitalista, socialista, comunista o cualquier otro engendro de ideas mal-aplicadas.
Tal vez, un bisnieto tuyo será de los pioneros en revitalizar el compromiso. Porque ya está comprobado que la ‘gente bien’ de hoy y su prole son la raíz del problema, más que los marginales, más que los eternos pobres que nos acompañan con infinita paciencia. El problema es nuestro y la solución también, si queremos sobrevivir con dignidad.
Abrazos de un yerno consternado
Febrero 2009
sábado, 13 de febrero de 2010
James Turrell: Heavy on Light - JT Museum at Colomé
Let There Be Light; and There Was Light
Genesis. I, 3
The James Turrell Museum of the Hess Art Collection at Colomé is disquieting. There is nothing on the walls, no sculptures rise from the floor, no mobiles hang from the ceiling. Just light! Never has so much been made of apparently so little. Viewers come and go in what the artist calls ‘the glazed-eye state’. Light is a tricky substance, if it is a substance at all. Waves and particles of the ephemeral electromagnetic radiation permeate our lives. James Turrell (1943) gives us the artist’s side of the equation: light plus technology equal enlightenment, or at least a deeper awareness of our human condition.
The building itself is a solid representation of contemporary museum architecture, set at the center of ever-expanding concentric circles conformed by the nucleus, the Turrell Museum itself, the vineyards that surround the 1,700 square meter landmark building in lush green, the beiges of the adjacent arid crust of earth, followed by the multi-toned grays of the Andean foothills spreading West before the majestic peaks of the Cordillera itself.
Donald Hess, the enlightened entrepreneur who looked for a challenge and a story, not just an easy business model, when establishing his boutique hotel and winery in Argentina, has converted Colomé, Argentina’s oldest wine producer and highest vineyard, into an ecological paradise. Hess, in a signature expression of human ecology, has made a functioning community out of a dysfunctional group of several hundred struggling survivors, descendents of the original grape-growers from centuries before. The Hess formula, combining award-winning wines with museum-proven contemporary art, adds pleasure to his and his family’s life and an extra dimension to his sales pitch: fine wines and great art at special venues all over the world: Argentina, Australia (coming next), South Africa and California.
At Colomé, nature is omnipresent; nothing interrupts its timeless display. Hess was so inspired by the setting that he invited James Turrell in 2001 to design and coordinate the project for a structure to house nine of the artist’s foremost creations. The museum was inaugurated on April 22, 2009, after eighteen months of construction and installation. The museum is now becoming a “must” on the international art circuit.
Enlightenment is a special grace few people can handle: light itself is a powerful source of illumination, in every sense of the word. We tend to take light for granted. We either have it or we don’t. It’s either everywhere or nowhere. Nor do we stop to think much about illumination, natural or artificial. It’s either bright like an airport or dim like a romantic restaurant. Light plays an important role in suggesting moods, in making us feel safe or edgy. It can inspire and it can threaten. A torturer can use too much light as an instrument to debilitate a prisoner’s willpower. The military teaches its recruits to “see” in the dark. Night vision is a form of visually heightened awareness which can save lives, or facilitate eliminating them.
But for most of us, light is a matter of waiting for the sun or clicking a switch: automatic reactions to everyday needs. The dimmer gave us a certain degree of control over the intensity or volume of light in a specific space. One can determine a luminous mood to accompany a musical one. Polarized windows and sunglasses allow us to reduce the potentially damaging rays of sunlight. We can consciously exercise a degree of control over the light that envelops us.
Light has always been a relevant factor in art. Artists paint light in ways that highlight the portions of pictures they wish to emphasize. As illumination developed into a technology, artists and museum staff developed better and better ways to spotlight works of art. Many theories arose concerning the benefits and dangers of focusing more and more light on art works. Some artists even include sources of artificial light within their work. An unseemly cable might wind up the wall to an object, producing movement and/or light. Kinetic artists in the Sixties devised merry-go-rounds of kaleidoscopic nature, in which plastics and metals wiggled and reflected, shimmered and shone. Shadows could insinuate chiaroscuros, just as a rainbow produces chromatic fireworks.
But it never occurred to an artist to work with light as his principal raw material. Light is elusive, ephemeral, and impossible to package: how could it be presented in a gallery showroom, in a museum space, in a collector’s home? No one ever gave the question much thought.
Then James Turrell came along, and light became paint and a brush, paper and pencil, his sole tool. He contrived ways to exhibit light, to give it content and meaning, to contextualize it, to contain it or let it flow freely through space. Displaying light requires greater spatial dimensions than an engraving or a classical sculpture. Light is expansive and can be focused or not: it may be limitless. It can be diffuse or pinpointed.
Turrell’s origins as a Californian Quaker gave him a firm set of principles on which to build. As an adolescent, he lived in a ground-floor apartment on a busy Los Angeles thoroughfare. The street-front window to his room was covered with a piece of black-out cloth, which he usually kept closed in daylight and occasionally at night. He became intrigued how the rays of light would find tiny holes through which to enter his room and how they behaved once they were in there. He was light-struck: fogged by accidental exposure as the dictionary says.
He began to experiment, making different sized holes in the curtain, finally reproducing the night sky of stars and planets with pinpoint-sized holes. This exercise awakened his obsession with the phenomena and characteristics of light. He worked the subject into his studies at Pomona College and his graduate art courses at the University of California at Irvine. By 1966, at 23, he had his own studio in the defunct Mendota Hotel on Ocean Park in Santa Monica. He sealed off two rooms from all exterior light, installed false walls, painted everything in sight white and started projecting the light that led him to his illuminating career.
Turrell plays with all of its potential and gently lets us descend into its depths. Fathoming light is similar to the process of a diver decompressing as he arises from the depths of the sea: you can’t rush the process. Turrell sets us loose in a timeless dimension where our physical parameters lose their control of space. James Hall wrote in London’s “The Independent” that Turrell’s work is “as much a theatre of cruelty as it is a theatre of contemplation”. He referred ironically to the dangers of losing one’s way after an overdose of light.
Turrell thrusts us into an enclosure that we intuit has walls or constraining limits, but we can not consciously see them. Our perception is of altered fields of color that confuse our preordained conceptions of visual boundaries. Besides being bathed in the beauty of pure color, a sensation that pervades our consciousness, we become aware of our inherent limitations and our susceptibility to take for granted what we believe we are “seeing”. And beyond “seeing, “being”. Turrell’s light works confirm that we humans are not capable of feeling comfortable without self-proscribed limits. Finding ourselves before the possibility of limitlessness produces anxiety. We are before the dark side of beauty.
Turrell’s most important legacy to viewers: don’t always believe your eyes because they are just the windows of your mind. Open your mind to the dimensionless surroundings that await one with a dose of enlightenment or with exposure to the limitlessness of expanding light. Let the physical boundaries we know dissolve and stretch…
Each of Turrell’s sleights-of-light offers a different facet of the unknown. Unfortunately you can’t take it with you, you can’t photograph it, nor can you hang it on your wall. Now you see it, now you don’t. These cubes of colored air come and go inside the walls that retain them: only in your mind’s eye, in the brief flash of a dream, in a Technicolor memory chip can a hint of their omnipresence occur. Is the sea the same color at night when there is no daylight? When the sun vanishes and all is dark, is the sky still blue? Color too comes and goes, and one color can alter the intensity of another, enhancing or diminishing its magnitude. Turrell has mastered the science behind these phenomena, and after years of experimentation has developed computer programs to wield light as he pleases.
“Sky Space” is the most ambitious of the works on display. The ‘environmental’ piece is an interactive work that commands the viewer’s vision to focus on a wall of ever-changing colors for 55 minutes. The experience recalls instants at an occultist’s office, eye tests for drivers’ licenses, moments of meditation, the afterglow from concentrating too long on the sun: as well as a peaceful passage through a never-never land of dancing colors. The proposal is simple enough, lie down on a blanket within the limits of a five-meter black marble square in the middle of a room rimmed with built-in cement seats and look skyward through a similar-sized square hole in the roof – just you and your eye and the sky: and that hole to the great beyond. The effect of this séance with the sky depends on the precise instant of the sunset, so viewing time changes every day.
The first impression is a pale blue sky. Pastel tones predominate as the sting of the sun’s rays evaporates. Little by little, Turrell tricks us into thinking that the sky is changing color, tone, density as he varies the shade of color that surrounds the actual sky space beyond the ceiling, painting the solid surface with a uniform layer of gradually-suffusing color.
The eye begins to enjoy these clever deceits and calls for more. The mind gradually stops questioning the process, abandoning any attempt to determine the whys and wherefores of cause and effect, the rational reasons for the visual responses. Acceptance of harmony, beauty, and peace of mind takes over, and we slip into an unquestioning state where this massage of color tones releases us from our preconceptions and our arsenal of self-evident nuggets of truth, which so often lead us astray.
But Turrell is not a New Age Guru of meditation and manipulation. He doesn’t preach, he’s not peddling magic formulas. He just wraps us up in his light in a way that satisfies his artistic curiosity. It’s his pilgrimage, not ours. And nature provides the rainbow.
Half a dozen viewers lie in stillness, a shoe scuffs the stone surface, a stomach gurgles, a sigh resonates, but silence is almost pervasive as each one of us follows his own path through this jungle, this desert, this sea, this garden of color. As blue fades into black, we focus on a single emerging star that reminds us that we are one with the heavens, and that light travels at a different speed than we do. We remember that even stars are born and die, with limited lifetimes to spread their illumination for everyone everywhere to see: a dot on a backdrop of infinity, a span of time whose measure we cannot fathom.
The experience is intensified because it occurs in such an inaccessible place. Distance, discomfort and expense are determining factors. Argentina is off most people’s radar. The northwestern province of Salta is off most Argentines’ radar, and Colomé is off most salteños’ radar. If you don’t read certain international financial newsletters which tout Salta as a coming off-shore Shangri-La, there is no reason for anyone to know about this paradise.
At least four hours in a 4 x 4 separate the airport of the provincial capital from the James Turrell Museum. A three-hour flight separates Salta from Buenos Aires, and then an overnight flight to anywhere else. When Turrell learned of the logistics involved in arriving to the site that Donald Hess proposed, he hesitated and then declared: “I suffered a lot making these pieces. It’s probably a good thing that the viewers suffer too.”
Getting to Colomé provides its own sound and light show. As the sun moves across the sky, the colorful rock formations that rim the road take on different hues, different shades of the encyclopedia of colors that the Earth offers us. Shadows dance, contract, expand, creating ominous corners, curious figures of dark on lighter surfaces. The clouds add yet another dimension, frolicking across the sky. All are preliminaries to the main event: Turrell’s display of total immersion in the astonishing subtleties of light. As one critic wrote, “He makes it possible for us to see light as light rather than illumination on objects.” We arrive to Colomé predisposed to experience the sublime.
Light works at the museum:
1. Alta Green 1968, Cross-Wall Projection Pieces Series
The earliest Projection Pieces were done in 1966, formed by light projected across a corner from a slightly modified quartz halogen projector. The effect of the Projections is to produce a rectangle of light across a corner of two intersecting walls in such a way that from a distance the form of a green pyramid shape touches the floor, yet in some manner it is still attached to the corner of the space. The effect is that of objectifying and turning physically present light into a tangible material. As the process evolved, Turrell began to use xenon projectors which allowed the size of the projections to be larger and more focused, giving the image a sense of solidity. The intensity of the sensation produced in Alta Green is provided by these new, more powerful projectors.
2. Lunette 2005, Structural Cuts Series
In his Structural Cuts pieces, the work of art emerges from sculpting the light in the sky by using direct processes of perception. Oriignally, Lunette was installed at Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo’s villa in Varese, Italy in 1974. The semi-circular cut replaces a lunette window at the end of a barrel-vaulted hallway. Interior ambient illumination is provided by hidden neon-argon tube lighting placed on top of a ledge located at the springing of the barrel-vault. Lunette is an eye-boggling experience: the viewer penetrates a long corridor enveloped in a series of different volumes of colored light, integrating tones of red, green, violet, blue and finally black. The feeling is eerie: one is surrounded by uncontained, dimensionless color. The viewer loses any sense of place, finding himself adrift in sequential waves of light.
3. Penumbra 1992, Windows Series
This work is placed in a small room with a superimposed set of smaller walls. The light comes from the space between the walls and illuminates the interior room, placing the viewer in a light bubble that defies definition. Once again the viewer must adjust the parameters of visual receptivity and let the light set the rules.
4. City of Arhirit 1976, Ganzfeld Series
The space is bathed in red, green, violet, blue and finally black light. One has no sensation of the walls at either side. The feeling is of a ceiling-less area with a black path on the floor and a red square of light at a height of eight feet. The term ‘Ganzfeld’ comes from perceptual psychology and refers to a totally homogenous visual field. Turrell adapted a perceptual approach to art making, after first coming into contact with visual fields at Pomona College. City of Arhirit was first exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, as a series of four linked chambers that made use of homogenous visual fields. The room-sized spaces opened off the side of a narrow corridor, and, from positions along this passageway, each room seemed to be filled with a haze of light. The ambient illumination appeared to fill the space with an almost physical pressure. The externally produced light reflected the color that resonated in the area surrounding each external aperture. “Each room was lit by outside light that entered through a small window behind the viewer. The light was controlled in passing through this window so as to create a homogenous field of pale color in each of the rooms. The interior light varies, depending on the time of day, the day of the year, and the atmospheric conditions,” Turrell declares. The viewer’s response to the light in each room is influenced by the afterglow of the color of the light in the previous room, as well as the amount of time spent assimilating the light in each space.
5. Spread 2003, Ganzfeld Series
This 400 square-meter walk-in environment of blue light was made especially for the Museum at Colomé. Viewers remove their shoes to climb in search of the source of the light. Nine steps form a wide staircase: at the tenth step, one enters a cube with a tenuous blue light. Viewers feel they are floating as they approach the blue along a slightly inclined surface. The seemingly limitless blueness draws one like a magnet. An alarm sounds if anyone gets too close to the source. When another version of the piece was shown at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1980, a man went to close and fell off the edge, breaking his hip. On descending the steps, the doorway out, which might be confused with a movie screen, is rimmed with yellow neon light. Looking back in, the effect is that one is looking at a large blue painting.
6. Stufe (White) 1967, Cross-Wall Projection Pieces Series
This is Turrell’s first light work. A light in the form of a cube crosses intersecting walls at an angle, leaving a pattern on part of the walls. The viewer is unaware of the origin of the beam of light. The phenomenon is disconcerting, even mystical. See No. 1. for further description of the process.
7. Slant Range 1989, Arcus Series
In the Arcus Series, Turrell transforms the space into a setting in which light becomes three-dimensional and space is an illusion. The effects of the tungsten, ultraviolet and daylight mix reveal light’s ability to be a changing presence in our lives. This effect is achieved by hidden ultraviolet fluorescent fixtures recessed around the inside edge of the aperture. A narrow split at one side of the enclosed space allows sunlight from windows located behind the space to enter the chamber. Slant Range was first made for Turrell’s exhibition at the Musée d’Art Contemporain at Nimes, France in 1989.
8. Wedgework II (Pale Blue) 1967, Wedgework Series
The motivation behind the pieces in this series is to create partitions of light that traverse the spaces of interior rooms, generating wedge-shaped subdivisions along their diagonals. Reminiscent of light streaming through the cracks in old barns or the beams of light falling through the canopy of a forest, Turrell’s version is more closely controlled and more mysterious.
9. Unseen Blue 2002, Skyspaces Series
The world’s largest Skyspace. Refer to description in text above.
Prints:
1. First Light (1989-90), a series of twenty prints made by Swiss engraver Peter Kneubühler.
This series of black on white aquatint prints using the intaglio process was made after the light pieces they refer back to had been developed. First Light reproduces the bright state of light as it comes into contact with the flat surface of the wall. The haunting volume that the works project is enhanced by the light emitted by ERCO lamps, which have a double filter and a special lens for diffusing light. The effect makes the color black appear to have volume as it emerges from the white background. Conceptual in essence, these works are based on the ground-breaking Projection Pieces. (see : 1. and 6.)
2. Still Light (1990-91), a series of eight prints made by Swiss engraver Peter Kneubühler.
The aquatint process provides the purest, most light-catching form of etching, where line is replaced by the subtle over-all tonal effects that the light permits. A series of geometric forms are set on gray backgrounds in a more visually contextualized, less dramatic presentation than established in First Light. In contrast to the sharp definition of the First Light series, the Still Light prints evoke the misty atmospheric quality of the projection.
Turrell’s most ambitious effort is a land art project located at Roden Crater near Flagstaff, Arizona, within an extinct volcano. The artist has been transforming this piece of mountain into a sky laboratory and naked-eye celestial observatory for the past 34 years. After nine years at his multiple cubes of artificial light at the Mendota Hotel, he went straight to his volcano, a heady transition, even for an artist willing to follow the light of his guiding star.
Craig Adcock describes the thrust of the mind-boggling plan. “Turrell’s Roden Crater Project is an interactive sculptural environment: its subject matter is light and space. The way this subject matter is engaged both on the exterior and in the interior of the ancient cinder cone engenders contemplation. At its most profound levels, the completed project will allow us to stand in the present and look into both the past and the future. Light, in one of its aspects, is time. The crater will focus our attention on infinite reaches that are both geologic and astronomical, both personal and psychological. The entire project with its myriad interior and exterior spaces functions in terms of the light in the sky. (…) It is a place where artificial spaces merge with nature and art melds with the affective spaces of individual consciousness.”
The Turrell experience obviously goes beyond just the art works in themselves. The viewer is taken on a journey to an unknown world with no recognizable coordinates. Silence and a sense of isolation are constant companions. Dimensions are distorted and distances cannot be judged by usual parameters. Turrell says, “In a lucid dream, you have a sharper sense of color and lucidity than with your eyes open. I’m interested in the point where imaginative seeing and outside seeing meet, where it becomes difficult to differentiate between seeing from the inside and seeing from the outside.”
Anyone, literate in art or not, can see what Turrell is getting at and where he wants to take his quest. A viewer can learn a lot about himself, if he is willing to do so, just by spending an hour or two at the Museum. You will come away with a few answers and a whole new set of questions to ponder, maybe even with the light to enlighten, or at least lighten, your way.
Edward Shaw
Tunquén
January 2010
Genesis. I, 3
The James Turrell Museum of the Hess Art Collection at Colomé is disquieting. There is nothing on the walls, no sculptures rise from the floor, no mobiles hang from the ceiling. Just light! Never has so much been made of apparently so little. Viewers come and go in what the artist calls ‘the glazed-eye state’. Light is a tricky substance, if it is a substance at all. Waves and particles of the ephemeral electromagnetic radiation permeate our lives. James Turrell (1943) gives us the artist’s side of the equation: light plus technology equal enlightenment, or at least a deeper awareness of our human condition.
The building itself is a solid representation of contemporary museum architecture, set at the center of ever-expanding concentric circles conformed by the nucleus, the Turrell Museum itself, the vineyards that surround the 1,700 square meter landmark building in lush green, the beiges of the adjacent arid crust of earth, followed by the multi-toned grays of the Andean foothills spreading West before the majestic peaks of the Cordillera itself.
Donald Hess, the enlightened entrepreneur who looked for a challenge and a story, not just an easy business model, when establishing his boutique hotel and winery in Argentina, has converted Colomé, Argentina’s oldest wine producer and highest vineyard, into an ecological paradise. Hess, in a signature expression of human ecology, has made a functioning community out of a dysfunctional group of several hundred struggling survivors, descendents of the original grape-growers from centuries before. The Hess formula, combining award-winning wines with museum-proven contemporary art, adds pleasure to his and his family’s life and an extra dimension to his sales pitch: fine wines and great art at special venues all over the world: Argentina, Australia (coming next), South Africa and California.
At Colomé, nature is omnipresent; nothing interrupts its timeless display. Hess was so inspired by the setting that he invited James Turrell in 2001 to design and coordinate the project for a structure to house nine of the artist’s foremost creations. The museum was inaugurated on April 22, 2009, after eighteen months of construction and installation. The museum is now becoming a “must” on the international art circuit.
Enlightenment is a special grace few people can handle: light itself is a powerful source of illumination, in every sense of the word. We tend to take light for granted. We either have it or we don’t. It’s either everywhere or nowhere. Nor do we stop to think much about illumination, natural or artificial. It’s either bright like an airport or dim like a romantic restaurant. Light plays an important role in suggesting moods, in making us feel safe or edgy. It can inspire and it can threaten. A torturer can use too much light as an instrument to debilitate a prisoner’s willpower. The military teaches its recruits to “see” in the dark. Night vision is a form of visually heightened awareness which can save lives, or facilitate eliminating them.
But for most of us, light is a matter of waiting for the sun or clicking a switch: automatic reactions to everyday needs. The dimmer gave us a certain degree of control over the intensity or volume of light in a specific space. One can determine a luminous mood to accompany a musical one. Polarized windows and sunglasses allow us to reduce the potentially damaging rays of sunlight. We can consciously exercise a degree of control over the light that envelops us.
Light has always been a relevant factor in art. Artists paint light in ways that highlight the portions of pictures they wish to emphasize. As illumination developed into a technology, artists and museum staff developed better and better ways to spotlight works of art. Many theories arose concerning the benefits and dangers of focusing more and more light on art works. Some artists even include sources of artificial light within their work. An unseemly cable might wind up the wall to an object, producing movement and/or light. Kinetic artists in the Sixties devised merry-go-rounds of kaleidoscopic nature, in which plastics and metals wiggled and reflected, shimmered and shone. Shadows could insinuate chiaroscuros, just as a rainbow produces chromatic fireworks.
But it never occurred to an artist to work with light as his principal raw material. Light is elusive, ephemeral, and impossible to package: how could it be presented in a gallery showroom, in a museum space, in a collector’s home? No one ever gave the question much thought.
Then James Turrell came along, and light became paint and a brush, paper and pencil, his sole tool. He contrived ways to exhibit light, to give it content and meaning, to contextualize it, to contain it or let it flow freely through space. Displaying light requires greater spatial dimensions than an engraving or a classical sculpture. Light is expansive and can be focused or not: it may be limitless. It can be diffuse or pinpointed.
Turrell’s origins as a Californian Quaker gave him a firm set of principles on which to build. As an adolescent, he lived in a ground-floor apartment on a busy Los Angeles thoroughfare. The street-front window to his room was covered with a piece of black-out cloth, which he usually kept closed in daylight and occasionally at night. He became intrigued how the rays of light would find tiny holes through which to enter his room and how they behaved once they were in there. He was light-struck: fogged by accidental exposure as the dictionary says.
He began to experiment, making different sized holes in the curtain, finally reproducing the night sky of stars and planets with pinpoint-sized holes. This exercise awakened his obsession with the phenomena and characteristics of light. He worked the subject into his studies at Pomona College and his graduate art courses at the University of California at Irvine. By 1966, at 23, he had his own studio in the defunct Mendota Hotel on Ocean Park in Santa Monica. He sealed off two rooms from all exterior light, installed false walls, painted everything in sight white and started projecting the light that led him to his illuminating career.
Turrell plays with all of its potential and gently lets us descend into its depths. Fathoming light is similar to the process of a diver decompressing as he arises from the depths of the sea: you can’t rush the process. Turrell sets us loose in a timeless dimension where our physical parameters lose their control of space. James Hall wrote in London’s “The Independent” that Turrell’s work is “as much a theatre of cruelty as it is a theatre of contemplation”. He referred ironically to the dangers of losing one’s way after an overdose of light.
Turrell thrusts us into an enclosure that we intuit has walls or constraining limits, but we can not consciously see them. Our perception is of altered fields of color that confuse our preordained conceptions of visual boundaries. Besides being bathed in the beauty of pure color, a sensation that pervades our consciousness, we become aware of our inherent limitations and our susceptibility to take for granted what we believe we are “seeing”. And beyond “seeing, “being”. Turrell’s light works confirm that we humans are not capable of feeling comfortable without self-proscribed limits. Finding ourselves before the possibility of limitlessness produces anxiety. We are before the dark side of beauty.
Turrell’s most important legacy to viewers: don’t always believe your eyes because they are just the windows of your mind. Open your mind to the dimensionless surroundings that await one with a dose of enlightenment or with exposure to the limitlessness of expanding light. Let the physical boundaries we know dissolve and stretch…
Each of Turrell’s sleights-of-light offers a different facet of the unknown. Unfortunately you can’t take it with you, you can’t photograph it, nor can you hang it on your wall. Now you see it, now you don’t. These cubes of colored air come and go inside the walls that retain them: only in your mind’s eye, in the brief flash of a dream, in a Technicolor memory chip can a hint of their omnipresence occur. Is the sea the same color at night when there is no daylight? When the sun vanishes and all is dark, is the sky still blue? Color too comes and goes, and one color can alter the intensity of another, enhancing or diminishing its magnitude. Turrell has mastered the science behind these phenomena, and after years of experimentation has developed computer programs to wield light as he pleases.
“Sky Space” is the most ambitious of the works on display. The ‘environmental’ piece is an interactive work that commands the viewer’s vision to focus on a wall of ever-changing colors for 55 minutes. The experience recalls instants at an occultist’s office, eye tests for drivers’ licenses, moments of meditation, the afterglow from concentrating too long on the sun: as well as a peaceful passage through a never-never land of dancing colors. The proposal is simple enough, lie down on a blanket within the limits of a five-meter black marble square in the middle of a room rimmed with built-in cement seats and look skyward through a similar-sized square hole in the roof – just you and your eye and the sky: and that hole to the great beyond. The effect of this séance with the sky depends on the precise instant of the sunset, so viewing time changes every day.
The first impression is a pale blue sky. Pastel tones predominate as the sting of the sun’s rays evaporates. Little by little, Turrell tricks us into thinking that the sky is changing color, tone, density as he varies the shade of color that surrounds the actual sky space beyond the ceiling, painting the solid surface with a uniform layer of gradually-suffusing color.
The eye begins to enjoy these clever deceits and calls for more. The mind gradually stops questioning the process, abandoning any attempt to determine the whys and wherefores of cause and effect, the rational reasons for the visual responses. Acceptance of harmony, beauty, and peace of mind takes over, and we slip into an unquestioning state where this massage of color tones releases us from our preconceptions and our arsenal of self-evident nuggets of truth, which so often lead us astray.
But Turrell is not a New Age Guru of meditation and manipulation. He doesn’t preach, he’s not peddling magic formulas. He just wraps us up in his light in a way that satisfies his artistic curiosity. It’s his pilgrimage, not ours. And nature provides the rainbow.
Half a dozen viewers lie in stillness, a shoe scuffs the stone surface, a stomach gurgles, a sigh resonates, but silence is almost pervasive as each one of us follows his own path through this jungle, this desert, this sea, this garden of color. As blue fades into black, we focus on a single emerging star that reminds us that we are one with the heavens, and that light travels at a different speed than we do. We remember that even stars are born and die, with limited lifetimes to spread their illumination for everyone everywhere to see: a dot on a backdrop of infinity, a span of time whose measure we cannot fathom.
The experience is intensified because it occurs in such an inaccessible place. Distance, discomfort and expense are determining factors. Argentina is off most people’s radar. The northwestern province of Salta is off most Argentines’ radar, and Colomé is off most salteños’ radar. If you don’t read certain international financial newsletters which tout Salta as a coming off-shore Shangri-La, there is no reason for anyone to know about this paradise.
At least four hours in a 4 x 4 separate the airport of the provincial capital from the James Turrell Museum. A three-hour flight separates Salta from Buenos Aires, and then an overnight flight to anywhere else. When Turrell learned of the logistics involved in arriving to the site that Donald Hess proposed, he hesitated and then declared: “I suffered a lot making these pieces. It’s probably a good thing that the viewers suffer too.”
Getting to Colomé provides its own sound and light show. As the sun moves across the sky, the colorful rock formations that rim the road take on different hues, different shades of the encyclopedia of colors that the Earth offers us. Shadows dance, contract, expand, creating ominous corners, curious figures of dark on lighter surfaces. The clouds add yet another dimension, frolicking across the sky. All are preliminaries to the main event: Turrell’s display of total immersion in the astonishing subtleties of light. As one critic wrote, “He makes it possible for us to see light as light rather than illumination on objects.” We arrive to Colomé predisposed to experience the sublime.
Light works at the museum:
1. Alta Green 1968, Cross-Wall Projection Pieces Series
The earliest Projection Pieces were done in 1966, formed by light projected across a corner from a slightly modified quartz halogen projector. The effect of the Projections is to produce a rectangle of light across a corner of two intersecting walls in such a way that from a distance the form of a green pyramid shape touches the floor, yet in some manner it is still attached to the corner of the space. The effect is that of objectifying and turning physically present light into a tangible material. As the process evolved, Turrell began to use xenon projectors which allowed the size of the projections to be larger and more focused, giving the image a sense of solidity. The intensity of the sensation produced in Alta Green is provided by these new, more powerful projectors.
2. Lunette 2005, Structural Cuts Series
In his Structural Cuts pieces, the work of art emerges from sculpting the light in the sky by using direct processes of perception. Oriignally, Lunette was installed at Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo’s villa in Varese, Italy in 1974. The semi-circular cut replaces a lunette window at the end of a barrel-vaulted hallway. Interior ambient illumination is provided by hidden neon-argon tube lighting placed on top of a ledge located at the springing of the barrel-vault. Lunette is an eye-boggling experience: the viewer penetrates a long corridor enveloped in a series of different volumes of colored light, integrating tones of red, green, violet, blue and finally black. The feeling is eerie: one is surrounded by uncontained, dimensionless color. The viewer loses any sense of place, finding himself adrift in sequential waves of light.
3. Penumbra 1992, Windows Series
This work is placed in a small room with a superimposed set of smaller walls. The light comes from the space between the walls and illuminates the interior room, placing the viewer in a light bubble that defies definition. Once again the viewer must adjust the parameters of visual receptivity and let the light set the rules.
4. City of Arhirit 1976, Ganzfeld Series
The space is bathed in red, green, violet, blue and finally black light. One has no sensation of the walls at either side. The feeling is of a ceiling-less area with a black path on the floor and a red square of light at a height of eight feet. The term ‘Ganzfeld’ comes from perceptual psychology and refers to a totally homogenous visual field. Turrell adapted a perceptual approach to art making, after first coming into contact with visual fields at Pomona College. City of Arhirit was first exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, as a series of four linked chambers that made use of homogenous visual fields. The room-sized spaces opened off the side of a narrow corridor, and, from positions along this passageway, each room seemed to be filled with a haze of light. The ambient illumination appeared to fill the space with an almost physical pressure. The externally produced light reflected the color that resonated in the area surrounding each external aperture. “Each room was lit by outside light that entered through a small window behind the viewer. The light was controlled in passing through this window so as to create a homogenous field of pale color in each of the rooms. The interior light varies, depending on the time of day, the day of the year, and the atmospheric conditions,” Turrell declares. The viewer’s response to the light in each room is influenced by the afterglow of the color of the light in the previous room, as well as the amount of time spent assimilating the light in each space.
5. Spread 2003, Ganzfeld Series
This 400 square-meter walk-in environment of blue light was made especially for the Museum at Colomé. Viewers remove their shoes to climb in search of the source of the light. Nine steps form a wide staircase: at the tenth step, one enters a cube with a tenuous blue light. Viewers feel they are floating as they approach the blue along a slightly inclined surface. The seemingly limitless blueness draws one like a magnet. An alarm sounds if anyone gets too close to the source. When another version of the piece was shown at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1980, a man went to close and fell off the edge, breaking his hip. On descending the steps, the doorway out, which might be confused with a movie screen, is rimmed with yellow neon light. Looking back in, the effect is that one is looking at a large blue painting.
6. Stufe (White) 1967, Cross-Wall Projection Pieces Series
This is Turrell’s first light work. A light in the form of a cube crosses intersecting walls at an angle, leaving a pattern on part of the walls. The viewer is unaware of the origin of the beam of light. The phenomenon is disconcerting, even mystical. See No. 1. for further description of the process.
7. Slant Range 1989, Arcus Series
In the Arcus Series, Turrell transforms the space into a setting in which light becomes three-dimensional and space is an illusion. The effects of the tungsten, ultraviolet and daylight mix reveal light’s ability to be a changing presence in our lives. This effect is achieved by hidden ultraviolet fluorescent fixtures recessed around the inside edge of the aperture. A narrow split at one side of the enclosed space allows sunlight from windows located behind the space to enter the chamber. Slant Range was first made for Turrell’s exhibition at the Musée d’Art Contemporain at Nimes, France in 1989.
8. Wedgework II (Pale Blue) 1967, Wedgework Series
The motivation behind the pieces in this series is to create partitions of light that traverse the spaces of interior rooms, generating wedge-shaped subdivisions along their diagonals. Reminiscent of light streaming through the cracks in old barns or the beams of light falling through the canopy of a forest, Turrell’s version is more closely controlled and more mysterious.
9. Unseen Blue 2002, Skyspaces Series
The world’s largest Skyspace. Refer to description in text above.
Prints:
1. First Light (1989-90), a series of twenty prints made by Swiss engraver Peter Kneubühler.
This series of black on white aquatint prints using the intaglio process was made after the light pieces they refer back to had been developed. First Light reproduces the bright state of light as it comes into contact with the flat surface of the wall. The haunting volume that the works project is enhanced by the light emitted by ERCO lamps, which have a double filter and a special lens for diffusing light. The effect makes the color black appear to have volume as it emerges from the white background. Conceptual in essence, these works are based on the ground-breaking Projection Pieces. (see : 1. and 6.)
2. Still Light (1990-91), a series of eight prints made by Swiss engraver Peter Kneubühler.
The aquatint process provides the purest, most light-catching form of etching, where line is replaced by the subtle over-all tonal effects that the light permits. A series of geometric forms are set on gray backgrounds in a more visually contextualized, less dramatic presentation than established in First Light. In contrast to the sharp definition of the First Light series, the Still Light prints evoke the misty atmospheric quality of the projection.
Turrell’s most ambitious effort is a land art project located at Roden Crater near Flagstaff, Arizona, within an extinct volcano. The artist has been transforming this piece of mountain into a sky laboratory and naked-eye celestial observatory for the past 34 years. After nine years at his multiple cubes of artificial light at the Mendota Hotel, he went straight to his volcano, a heady transition, even for an artist willing to follow the light of his guiding star.
Craig Adcock describes the thrust of the mind-boggling plan. “Turrell’s Roden Crater Project is an interactive sculptural environment: its subject matter is light and space. The way this subject matter is engaged both on the exterior and in the interior of the ancient cinder cone engenders contemplation. At its most profound levels, the completed project will allow us to stand in the present and look into both the past and the future. Light, in one of its aspects, is time. The crater will focus our attention on infinite reaches that are both geologic and astronomical, both personal and psychological. The entire project with its myriad interior and exterior spaces functions in terms of the light in the sky. (…) It is a place where artificial spaces merge with nature and art melds with the affective spaces of individual consciousness.”
The Turrell experience obviously goes beyond just the art works in themselves. The viewer is taken on a journey to an unknown world with no recognizable coordinates. Silence and a sense of isolation are constant companions. Dimensions are distorted and distances cannot be judged by usual parameters. Turrell says, “In a lucid dream, you have a sharper sense of color and lucidity than with your eyes open. I’m interested in the point where imaginative seeing and outside seeing meet, where it becomes difficult to differentiate between seeing from the inside and seeing from the outside.”
Anyone, literate in art or not, can see what Turrell is getting at and where he wants to take his quest. A viewer can learn a lot about himself, if he is willing to do so, just by spending an hour or two at the Museum. You will come away with a few answers and a whole new set of questions to ponder, maybe even with the light to enlighten, or at least lighten, your way.
Edward Shaw
Tunquén
January 2010
SARJO: Lava-Patrias - El país del eterno blanqueo
SARJO: El país del eterno blanqueo
LAVA-PATRIAS
Lavar eternamente la bandera argentina es una acción de arte de Sarjo que apunta a una búsqueda de blanqueo universal. Apunta a restaurar el ejercicio del juego limpio en las actividades, en este caso, públicas.
Argentina es un país que practica una limpieza constante de su quehacer institucional. No hay país en el planeta que ha convocado más ‘blanqueos’, que ha dado a sus ciudadanos más posibilidades de ponerse en limpio frente a la sociedad. Cada nueva administración permite a la ciudadanía salvar sus deudas con el fisco con grandes descuentos; hasta el mismo gobierno lo hace unilateralmente frente a las instituciones internacionales.
Tal vez es un reflejo de la fuerza de la religión Católica en el país, que estimula a sus fieles a confesarse para empezar de nuevo. Lavar el pecado para poder embarrarse de nuevo. Es una suerte de Carnaval de las cuentas públicas, de la ética, de la responsabilidad cívica, que son abusados todo el año sin compasión.
En Argentina, la corrupción ha creado una telaraña de complicidad que envuelve a todos, sin excepción. Esta obsesión con una limpieza, o blanqueo, periódico es particular a los porteños, y es fascinante que Sarjo quiera participar en el proceso con su ‘Lavi-Rap’ patriótico, una batería de lavarropas puestas en ciclo continuo para lavar y blanquear la bandera de la patria.
La bandera de Argentina, en si, es particular. Mientras sus vecinos celebran la sangre de la vitalidad, el brillo del sol, la robustez de la vegetación y la fuerza del mar y lo radiante del cielo en banderas multicolores, Argentina limita su celebración a una banda blanca entre dos franjas de azul pálido: es una bandera que podría parecer lavada de antemano.
Tal vez una bandera refleja el carácter y las aspiraciones de un pueblo. Argentina ha tenido un pasado particular, que se repite sin tregua. El futuro sigue esquivo. Y el presente es un pantano de confusiones, una seguidilla de decisiones equivocadas. El acto de Sarjo de purgar la bandera de tantas impurezas cabe dentro de la metodología oficial: proclamar efímeras limpiezas para tapar otras suciedades.
La limpieza y el lavado son muy de moda. Todo el mundo habla del ‘lavado’ de dinero: unos acusan a otros, pero la deseada limpieza nunca llega. En Argentina llevan el proceso a tal punto que hay gente que lava físicamente los billetes de cien dólares para reciclarlos en un mercado ansioso de poseerlos. Tal vez en un futuro operativo, Sarjo puede instalar mini-lavadoras para billetes, cheques y otros documentos financieros que han sido ensuciados.
Este prolongado baño de la bandera es un llamado de atención por parte de un artista vecino a quien le preocupa lo que lee sobre el país hermano y sus constantes problemas de imagen. Hay que tomarlo como un acto de hermandad más que una crítica o una humorada. Sarjo y sus maquinas de lavar apuntan a un blanqueo mental y espiritual, un lavado de cerebro que gatilla nuevas actitudes y acciones.
Edgard Shaw
LAVA-PATRIAS
Lavar eternamente la bandera argentina es una acción de arte de Sarjo que apunta a una búsqueda de blanqueo universal. Apunta a restaurar el ejercicio del juego limpio en las actividades, en este caso, públicas.
Argentina es un país que practica una limpieza constante de su quehacer institucional. No hay país en el planeta que ha convocado más ‘blanqueos’, que ha dado a sus ciudadanos más posibilidades de ponerse en limpio frente a la sociedad. Cada nueva administración permite a la ciudadanía salvar sus deudas con el fisco con grandes descuentos; hasta el mismo gobierno lo hace unilateralmente frente a las instituciones internacionales.
Tal vez es un reflejo de la fuerza de la religión Católica en el país, que estimula a sus fieles a confesarse para empezar de nuevo. Lavar el pecado para poder embarrarse de nuevo. Es una suerte de Carnaval de las cuentas públicas, de la ética, de la responsabilidad cívica, que son abusados todo el año sin compasión.
En Argentina, la corrupción ha creado una telaraña de complicidad que envuelve a todos, sin excepción. Esta obsesión con una limpieza, o blanqueo, periódico es particular a los porteños, y es fascinante que Sarjo quiera participar en el proceso con su ‘Lavi-Rap’ patriótico, una batería de lavarropas puestas en ciclo continuo para lavar y blanquear la bandera de la patria.
La bandera de Argentina, en si, es particular. Mientras sus vecinos celebran la sangre de la vitalidad, el brillo del sol, la robustez de la vegetación y la fuerza del mar y lo radiante del cielo en banderas multicolores, Argentina limita su celebración a una banda blanca entre dos franjas de azul pálido: es una bandera que podría parecer lavada de antemano.
Tal vez una bandera refleja el carácter y las aspiraciones de un pueblo. Argentina ha tenido un pasado particular, que se repite sin tregua. El futuro sigue esquivo. Y el presente es un pantano de confusiones, una seguidilla de decisiones equivocadas. El acto de Sarjo de purgar la bandera de tantas impurezas cabe dentro de la metodología oficial: proclamar efímeras limpiezas para tapar otras suciedades.
La limpieza y el lavado son muy de moda. Todo el mundo habla del ‘lavado’ de dinero: unos acusan a otros, pero la deseada limpieza nunca llega. En Argentina llevan el proceso a tal punto que hay gente que lava físicamente los billetes de cien dólares para reciclarlos en un mercado ansioso de poseerlos. Tal vez en un futuro operativo, Sarjo puede instalar mini-lavadoras para billetes, cheques y otros documentos financieros que han sido ensuciados.
Este prolongado baño de la bandera es un llamado de atención por parte de un artista vecino a quien le preocupa lo que lee sobre el país hermano y sus constantes problemas de imagen. Hay que tomarlo como un acto de hermandad más que una crítica o una humorada. Sarjo y sus maquinas de lavar apuntan a un blanqueo mental y espiritual, un lavado de cerebro que gatilla nuevas actitudes y acciones.
Edgard Shaw
Julian Prebisch: catalogue text, Recoleta Cultural Center, 2009
Julián Prebisch: catalogue text, Recoleta Cultural Center, 2009
For those of us who have followed the artistic evolution of Julián Prebisch (1977), we discover a new alignment, a new challenge in the work comprising this exhibition. On abandoning bright colors and psychedelic images, the young artist moves into a new, more personal universe, one of introspection, as if reaching to resolve an enigma that perplexes him. The Recoleta show reflects the depth of this process: it reveals the artist’s commitment to art and to life itself.
The results of this new perception are disconcerting: the works move us to reconsider his evolution. The game of abstracting images is over. Julián’s rainbow has entered a tunnel. The primary colors which the artist brandished like African flags have become opaque. The daring tones of earlier years have turned to pastel today, becoming muted. Also the atmosphere of the work has been transformed; it is more subtle, more profound. What was at the beginning a celebration, today is a rumination, a search. The artist manifests other concerns in this second institutional exhibition.
Today he is in the midst of a quest to find his own persona as an artist, his center in a world that has veered toward the periphery. He touches on topics that have their origins in certain practices related to magic. The occult sciences run through veins that approach, when turned inside out, quantum physics. Julián addresses his work like a scientist, an investigator looking to decipher a formula whose elements resist resolution. He advances at a pace more common to the laboratory, without pressing; he repeats experiments until the result is satisfactory.
While other artists of his generation seek their artistic ammunition on the outside, physically and geographically, Julián excavates the intricacies of his own being. Delving inside of one’s self is a tough task and often a painful one. The seeker finds debris and obstacles and must move beyond the rubbish that appears in any serious self-confrontation.
Today’s Julián is poised on the razor’s edge. He maintains his balance thanks to his natural talent and disciplined dedication. He manages to combine his essential dominion of the esthetic with the imagery he has chosen to use at this point in his career. He places emphasis not only on selecting his images with great care, but also takes advantage of a vast arsenal of materials. He mixes everything on the surface of the canvas, as well as beyond the limits of the stretcher; he integrates the picture’s frame into the work and adds objects, reminiscent of a mini-installation. All these elements contribute to enriching the work visually and conceptually.
If the earlier work seduced the eye with its hallucinatory dance, at this moment the sensation is purely post-Gothic. Julián’s palette is the tone of tempests, more black than white in every sense. His figures, when they appear, emerge from esoteric tomes, prints related to magic, from internal worlds that measure their march according to symbols and signs beyond those commonly encountered.
He attacks each work from three different angles. First, he prepares the background, which may seem to be the surface of a slice of marble or the painted pieces of paper that once wrapped around the inner covers of an ancient book. They are trompe l’oeil that echo nature, whose movements imitate liquids in revolution. He discovered that Coca-Cola could serve as a medium, instead of water, for preparing colors, and he used the popular soft drink to achieve these fluid textures.
Julián dedicates his most conscientious effort to this initial stage of the process. He introduces the plot, which can be summarized in an object such as a jar, a rooster, or a complex abstract design with Arabic reminiscences, a patchwork of tiny geometrics. Occasionally he adds fragments of glass, of mirrors, to impose certain rhythms and reflections that he seeks. He completes the work with a complex frame, related to the direction in which he wishes to direct the eye and the mind of the viewer.
Art Deco is a determinant in his world; it predominates in the decoration of his spaces, in the scheme of his designs and in his essential sense of esthetics. He applies it to his most formal expressions; he also allows himself to be seduced by its more degenerative aspect, kitsch. Deco provides a structure for his backgrounds; it offers a visual framework that captivates the eye. Kitsch appears in the anecdote, flaunting the popular spirit that manifests itself in excesses and exaggerations.
He imbues his paintings with symbolisms that are often self-referential. The receptor of his messages needs to accustom himself to the codes that the titles of the works veil: they become legible when one looks with caution and care. For example, Una cárcel de oro y plata (A Prison of Gold and Silver), Monoambiente (A Single Space – Space for One CUAL¿??), and Malamado corazón de piedra (Badly Loved Stone-Hearted OK???) are pieces of a personal poetics that escape the banality of the superficial. Nevertheless, the work can stand alone without analyzing the anecdote that lurks behind the image.
What most separates Julián from his peers is that he applies a classical approach to his art. He has a tremendous respect for what he produces and his aim is achieving posterity. There is a struggle implicit in any attempt at aiming for perfection. His character does not permit indecision: excellence and the obsession to obtain it guide each brushstroke. His rhythm is that of a snail, of the tortoise: he does not, for example, feel the compulsion of the hare. He can spend a morning in trance evaluating his next step, an entire day searching for just the right object to bring an idea to fruition.
He looks for his materials in the most unusual places. He uses a skinned rabbit in the freezer of a Peruvian restaurant as a model. The head of a pig hanging emblematically in a butcher’s shop serves as a pictorial element. He discovers fragments of fur or leather in the furriers of Boedo and visits merchants that trade in the artifacts of Santería and Umbanda.
He buys long tresses of black hair in markets and hangs them alongside pictures that represent the same braided locks, painted to perfection. He thus produces the transformation of an organic object into an immaterial image. He refers through this role-playing to the presence of magic in the world he constructs around him. His studio is full of possible conversions and re-contextualizations.
He traveled to Bolivia and frequented the markets where curanderas offered him a variety of exotic materials that later would find their place in his work or imagination. Here he integrates and incorporates this esthetic and its material manifestations into his work, without abandoning his own personality as an artist. These objects are unable to dominate him: they lose their original charge and seem like any other element in the complex construction of his work. To achieve that condition, Julian exercises a kind of magic when he mixes his elements, like a witch with her cauldron of herbs and roots.
Time is one of Julian’s most treasured tools. It is one of the scarcest resources in today’s world. While not everyone is in a situation that permits them to use time at will, Julián is, and he employs his hours as his needs dictate. Change requires time to mature at a healthy pace.
He works in series or, better said, in sequences, where one work leads to the next, the resolution of the first providing the point of initiation of another. A trilogy, for example, is composed of “El aburrimiento del rey padre” (The King Father’s Boredom), “Los caprichos de la reina” (The Queen’s Whims), and “El orgullo del principito” (The Little Prince’s Pride). There is, of course, no lineal link between the three paintings, but there is something in the first that triggers the next, and so on consecutively. Some titles are allusive: “La destrenzada” (The Unbraided), “Equipo de mago” (Magician’s Kit), “Chancho” (Pig), and others are more suggestive: “Matrimonio” (Marriage), “El silencio” (The Silence), or “La primera y última fase del enamoramiento” (The First and Last Phase of Falling in Love).
His evolution has followed a pendulum-like path. Vivid colors disappeared, to be replaced by subtle half-tones. The forms follow an architectural structure with personal projections. The codes of Art Deco discipline the composition. The emblematic figures of before have fallen before an invasion of images derived from the artist’s most recent curiosity.
If previously the painted picture was terrain enough to contain his expressivity, today Julián extends his domain over the wall surrounding the central piece. It is no longer sufficient to imprison the work in a neutral frame. The frame itself is integrated into the work, as well as the objects in the adjoining territory.
The actual world of this artist is more static, a world painted from his brain, not from an abstracted representation of the subject matter. He seeks to suspend time, allowing us to approach the work in an atemporal frame of reference. He allows us to recapture the perennial timing of art, without the acceleration of video, the fugitiveness of the performance or the immediacy of photography. To accept Julián Prebisch’s challenge is to rediscover the practice of meditation. This show is a feat of integration: of techniques, materials, space and image. His work proves that painting in and of itself is still valid, and in the hands of young artists like Julián, with talent and imagination, the art of painting will continue to astonish us, as it always has.
Edward Shaw
For those of us who have followed the artistic evolution of Julián Prebisch (1977), we discover a new alignment, a new challenge in the work comprising this exhibition. On abandoning bright colors and psychedelic images, the young artist moves into a new, more personal universe, one of introspection, as if reaching to resolve an enigma that perplexes him. The Recoleta show reflects the depth of this process: it reveals the artist’s commitment to art and to life itself.
The results of this new perception are disconcerting: the works move us to reconsider his evolution. The game of abstracting images is over. Julián’s rainbow has entered a tunnel. The primary colors which the artist brandished like African flags have become opaque. The daring tones of earlier years have turned to pastel today, becoming muted. Also the atmosphere of the work has been transformed; it is more subtle, more profound. What was at the beginning a celebration, today is a rumination, a search. The artist manifests other concerns in this second institutional exhibition.
Today he is in the midst of a quest to find his own persona as an artist, his center in a world that has veered toward the periphery. He touches on topics that have their origins in certain practices related to magic. The occult sciences run through veins that approach, when turned inside out, quantum physics. Julián addresses his work like a scientist, an investigator looking to decipher a formula whose elements resist resolution. He advances at a pace more common to the laboratory, without pressing; he repeats experiments until the result is satisfactory.
While other artists of his generation seek their artistic ammunition on the outside, physically and geographically, Julián excavates the intricacies of his own being. Delving inside of one’s self is a tough task and often a painful one. The seeker finds debris and obstacles and must move beyond the rubbish that appears in any serious self-confrontation.
Today’s Julián is poised on the razor’s edge. He maintains his balance thanks to his natural talent and disciplined dedication. He manages to combine his essential dominion of the esthetic with the imagery he has chosen to use at this point in his career. He places emphasis not only on selecting his images with great care, but also takes advantage of a vast arsenal of materials. He mixes everything on the surface of the canvas, as well as beyond the limits of the stretcher; he integrates the picture’s frame into the work and adds objects, reminiscent of a mini-installation. All these elements contribute to enriching the work visually and conceptually.
If the earlier work seduced the eye with its hallucinatory dance, at this moment the sensation is purely post-Gothic. Julián’s palette is the tone of tempests, more black than white in every sense. His figures, when they appear, emerge from esoteric tomes, prints related to magic, from internal worlds that measure their march according to symbols and signs beyond those commonly encountered.
He attacks each work from three different angles. First, he prepares the background, which may seem to be the surface of a slice of marble or the painted pieces of paper that once wrapped around the inner covers of an ancient book. They are trompe l’oeil that echo nature, whose movements imitate liquids in revolution. He discovered that Coca-Cola could serve as a medium, instead of water, for preparing colors, and he used the popular soft drink to achieve these fluid textures.
Julián dedicates his most conscientious effort to this initial stage of the process. He introduces the plot, which can be summarized in an object such as a jar, a rooster, or a complex abstract design with Arabic reminiscences, a patchwork of tiny geometrics. Occasionally he adds fragments of glass, of mirrors, to impose certain rhythms and reflections that he seeks. He completes the work with a complex frame, related to the direction in which he wishes to direct the eye and the mind of the viewer.
Art Deco is a determinant in his world; it predominates in the decoration of his spaces, in the scheme of his designs and in his essential sense of esthetics. He applies it to his most formal expressions; he also allows himself to be seduced by its more degenerative aspect, kitsch. Deco provides a structure for his backgrounds; it offers a visual framework that captivates the eye. Kitsch appears in the anecdote, flaunting the popular spirit that manifests itself in excesses and exaggerations.
He imbues his paintings with symbolisms that are often self-referential. The receptor of his messages needs to accustom himself to the codes that the titles of the works veil: they become legible when one looks with caution and care. For example, Una cárcel de oro y plata (A Prison of Gold and Silver), Monoambiente (A Single Space – Space for One CUAL¿??), and Malamado corazón de piedra (Badly Loved Stone-Hearted OK???) are pieces of a personal poetics that escape the banality of the superficial. Nevertheless, the work can stand alone without analyzing the anecdote that lurks behind the image.
What most separates Julián from his peers is that he applies a classical approach to his art. He has a tremendous respect for what he produces and his aim is achieving posterity. There is a struggle implicit in any attempt at aiming for perfection. His character does not permit indecision: excellence and the obsession to obtain it guide each brushstroke. His rhythm is that of a snail, of the tortoise: he does not, for example, feel the compulsion of the hare. He can spend a morning in trance evaluating his next step, an entire day searching for just the right object to bring an idea to fruition.
He looks for his materials in the most unusual places. He uses a skinned rabbit in the freezer of a Peruvian restaurant as a model. The head of a pig hanging emblematically in a butcher’s shop serves as a pictorial element. He discovers fragments of fur or leather in the furriers of Boedo and visits merchants that trade in the artifacts of Santería and Umbanda.
He buys long tresses of black hair in markets and hangs them alongside pictures that represent the same braided locks, painted to perfection. He thus produces the transformation of an organic object into an immaterial image. He refers through this role-playing to the presence of magic in the world he constructs around him. His studio is full of possible conversions and re-contextualizations.
He traveled to Bolivia and frequented the markets where curanderas offered him a variety of exotic materials that later would find their place in his work or imagination. Here he integrates and incorporates this esthetic and its material manifestations into his work, without abandoning his own personality as an artist. These objects are unable to dominate him: they lose their original charge and seem like any other element in the complex construction of his work. To achieve that condition, Julian exercises a kind of magic when he mixes his elements, like a witch with her cauldron of herbs and roots.
Time is one of Julian’s most treasured tools. It is one of the scarcest resources in today’s world. While not everyone is in a situation that permits them to use time at will, Julián is, and he employs his hours as his needs dictate. Change requires time to mature at a healthy pace.
He works in series or, better said, in sequences, where one work leads to the next, the resolution of the first providing the point of initiation of another. A trilogy, for example, is composed of “El aburrimiento del rey padre” (The King Father’s Boredom), “Los caprichos de la reina” (The Queen’s Whims), and “El orgullo del principito” (The Little Prince’s Pride). There is, of course, no lineal link between the three paintings, but there is something in the first that triggers the next, and so on consecutively. Some titles are allusive: “La destrenzada” (The Unbraided), “Equipo de mago” (Magician’s Kit), “Chancho” (Pig), and others are more suggestive: “Matrimonio” (Marriage), “El silencio” (The Silence), or “La primera y última fase del enamoramiento” (The First and Last Phase of Falling in Love).
His evolution has followed a pendulum-like path. Vivid colors disappeared, to be replaced by subtle half-tones. The forms follow an architectural structure with personal projections. The codes of Art Deco discipline the composition. The emblematic figures of before have fallen before an invasion of images derived from the artist’s most recent curiosity.
If previously the painted picture was terrain enough to contain his expressivity, today Julián extends his domain over the wall surrounding the central piece. It is no longer sufficient to imprison the work in a neutral frame. The frame itself is integrated into the work, as well as the objects in the adjoining territory.
The actual world of this artist is more static, a world painted from his brain, not from an abstracted representation of the subject matter. He seeks to suspend time, allowing us to approach the work in an atemporal frame of reference. He allows us to recapture the perennial timing of art, without the acceleration of video, the fugitiveness of the performance or the immediacy of photography. To accept Julián Prebisch’s challenge is to rediscover the practice of meditation. This show is a feat of integration: of techniques, materials, space and image. His work proves that painting in and of itself is still valid, and in the hands of young artists like Julián, with talent and imagination, the art of painting will continue to astonish us, as it always has.
Edward Shaw
Julian Prebisch: texto catálogo Recoleta 2009
Julian Prebisch: texto catálogo, Centro Cultural Recoleta, 2009
Quiénes venimos siguiendo la evolución de Julián Prebisch (1976) como artista, vemos en esta muestra una nueva apuesta, un nuevo desafío. Al abandonar los colores vivos y las imágenes sicodélicas, el joven artista entra en un nuevo universo, más personal, de búsqueda, de introspección, como queriendo resolver un enigma que lo perturba. Esta muestra refleja la profundidad de este proceso: revela su compromiso con el arte y la vida misma.
Los resultados de esta nueva mirada son inquietantes: la obra nos lleva a reconsiderar su evolución. El juego de la abstracción de las imágenes se acabó. El arco iris de Julián transita un túnel. Los colores primarios que blandeaba el artista como banderas africanas se opacaron. Los audaces matices de antes, hoy devuelven pastel, más mutados. También el clima de la obra se ha transformado; es más sutil, más hondo. Lo que en un principio fue una celebración, hoy es una reflexión, una indagación. Son otras las preocupaciones del artista en esta segunda muestra institucional.
Julián esta en medio de una búsqueda para encontrar su propia persona artística, su centro en un mundo que vira hacia la periferia. Toca temas que tienen su origen en ciertas prácticas relacionadas a la magia. Las ciencias ocultas corren por vetas que les acercan, cuando dadas vuelta, a la física cuántica. Julián se aproxima a su obra como un científico, un investigador en busca de descifrar una formula cuyos elementos resisten resolución. Avanza al ritmo de laboratorio, sin apurarse; repite experimentos hasta que el resultado le es satisfactorio.
Mientras que los demás de su generación encuentran sus municiones plásticas en el exterior, física y geográficamente, Julián excava las vetas de su ser. Buscar adentro de uno mismo es una faena dura y muchas veces dolorosa. Uno se encuentra con escombros y escollos que cuesta reconocer. Debe sortear los obstáculos y seguir más allá de la basura que aparece en cualquier auto-confrontación.
El Julián de hoy, entonces, camina sobre el filo de la navaja. Mantiene en equilibrio gracias a su talento natural y su disciplinada dedicación. Procura combinar su dominio natural de lo estético con la imaginería que ha escogido en esta instancia de su trayecto. Pone énfasis no solo en seleccionar con sumo cuidado la imagen, sino también sacar el jugo de una gran variedad de materiales. Va mezclando todo sobre la superficie de la tela y también fuera de su bastidor; integra los marcos a la obra y agrega objetos en pos de mini-instalación. Todo contribuye a enriquecer el trabajo visual y conceptualmente.
Si antes la obra sedujo el ojo con un baile alucinatorio, en este momento la sensación es puro pos-gótico. Su paleta es de tonos de tormenta, más negra que blanca en todo sentido. Sus figuras, cuando las haya, emergen de libros esotéricos, de estampas de magia, de mundos interiores que miden su marcha a través de símbolos y señales más allá de lo comúnmente vivido.
Trabaja cada obra desde tres ángulos. Primero, prepara un fondo, que puede parecer la superficie de un trozo de mármol, o los papeles pintados al interior de las tapas de un libro antiguo. Son trompe l’oeil que imitan a la naturaleza cuyos movimientos imitan líquidos en revolución. Descubrió que la Coca-Cola podría servir de medio en vez del agua al preparar los colores, y utilizó la popular bebida para lograr estas fluidas texturas plásticas.
Julián pone mucho énfasis y esfuerzo en este etapa inicial de la obra. Luego introduce la trama, que puede ser un objeto como un jarrón, un gallo, o un complejo diseño abstracto con reminiscencias arábicas, un patchwork de pequeños geometrías. A veces incorpora fragmentos de vidrio, de espejos para imponer ciertos ritmos, reflejos que busca. Termina la obra con un complejo marco y si hace falta, la complementa con algún elemento externo, relacionado con la dirección en la cuál él quiere enviar el ojo y la mente del espectador.
El Art Deco es un determinante en el mundo de Julián. Predomina en la decoración de sus espacios, en la trama de sus diseños y en su estética vital. Lo aplica en sus expresiones más formales, también se deja seducir por su aspecto degenerativo, el kitsch. El Deco da estructura a sus fondos, provee un marco visual que concentra la mirada. El kitsch aparece en la anécdota, esa manifestación del espíritu popular que se muestra en excesos y exageraciones.
Julián impregna todos sus cuadros con simbologías que a veces son auto-referentes. El receptor de sus mensajes necesita acostumbrarse a los códigos detrás de los títulos de las obras: se devuelven leíbles a mirar con cariño y cautela a las obras. Por ejemplo, cuando Julián sufre una pena de amor, pinta una paloma. Es parte de una poética personal que lo aleja de la banalidad de lo superficial. Sin embargo, la obra se defiende sin analizar la anécdota que se esconde detrás de la imagen.
Lo que más separa a Julián de sus pares es que parte de una actitud clásica. Tiene un tremendo respeto para lo que produce; postula llegar a la posteridad. Hay una pelea implícita en cualquier intento para acercarse a la perfección. Su carácter no permite medias tintas: la excelencia y la obsesión de obtenerla guían cada pincelada. Su ritmo es del caracol, de la tortuga: no siente, por ejemplo, los apuros de la liebre. Puede pasar una mañana en un trance evaluando el próximo paso, un día entero en buscar el objeto preciso para redondear una idea.
Busca sus materiales en los lugares más insólitos imaginables. Toma un conejo despellejado del freezer del restaurant peruano Chan Chan como modelo de un feto. Una cabeza de chancho colgada emblemáticamente en la carnecería le sirve de elemento pictórico. Busca fragmentos de piel o cuero en los talleres de peleteros en Boedo. Frecuenta las tiendas de santería y Umbanda.
Compra largas trenzas de pelo negro en el Barrio Chino. Cuelga las trenzas al lado de cuadros que representan las mismas trenzas, pintadas a la perfección. Así produce una transformación de un objeto orgánico a una imagen sin materia. Refiere con este juego de papeles a la presencia de la magia en el mundo que él arma a su alrededor. Su taller está repleto de posibles conversiones y relecturas.
De chico, Julián fue adicto al libro “Can I Play with Magic?”, un libro lúdico lleno de trucos de magia. Seguía su fascinación con lo oculto, pero siempre desde afuera, como mirón. “Soy un observador total del mundo sincrético.” Recalca que “me gusta la estética que tiene”. Viajó a Bolivia y frecuentó los mercados donde las curanderas le ofrecían un sinfín de materiales exóticos que luego podían encontrar lugar en la obra o en su imaginación. “Quiero recabar en cosas que no son comunes”.
Lo más esencial de esta historia es que Julián logra integrar e incorporar esta estética y sus manifestaciones materiales en su obra, sin perder su propia personalidad como artista. No logran dominarlo; pierden su cargo originario y parecen como un elemento más en la compleja construcción de la obra. Julián ejerce una suerte de magia cuando entremezcla sus elementos, como la bruja con sus cazuelas de hierbas y afines.
También pasó una estadía en Londres, donde se desarrolló otras facetas de su carácter y personalidad. Pudo observar el profesionalismo del artista en su máxima expresión. Se dio cuenta al volver a la Argentina que lo que tenía a su alcance en Buenos Aires nunca se acercaría a lo que un artista inglés tiene a su disposición. “Tengo que mover más la cabeza con los recursos y medios que tengo a mi alcance aquí”.
Tal vez el recurso más disponible y más único en el mundo de hoy en Buenos Aires es el tiempo. Julián lo usa a su manera; vivirlo a un ritmo propio es un lujo que no sería factible en Londres o Nueva York. Los cambios requieren tiempo, deben madurar sanamente. Julián es un solitario: “No puedo trabajar con otros en talleres o en equipos como en el cine,” dice. Estudió cine durante dos años, y arte también otros dos años. Pero su motivación viene más de sus viajes y sus propias especulaciones, que de la experiencia académica.
Julián trabaja en series, o mejor dicho, secuencias, donde una obra conduce a la próxima, su resolución proveyendo la punta de partida de la siguiente. Una trilogía, por ejemplo, está compuesta de “El aburrimiento del rey padre”, “Los caprichos de la reina” y “El orgullo del principito”. Por supuesto no hay una trama lineal entre los tres cuadros, pero hay algo en la primero que gatilla el siguiente, y así consecutivamente. Algunos títulos son alusivos: “La destrenzada”, “Equipo de mago”, “Chancho”, y otros son más bien sugestivos: “Matrimonio”, “El silencio” o “La primera y última fase del enamoramiento”.
La evolución de Julián ha seguido el trayecto del péndulo. Los colores vivaces desaparecieron, reemplazados por “tonos raros, con sutilezas”, en las palabras del artista. Las formas siguen una estructura arquitectónica con proyecciones personales. Los códigos del Art Deco disciplinan la composición. Las figuras emblemáticas de antes han caído ante una invasión de imágenes derivadas de su curiosidad actual.
Si antes el cuadro pintado fue suficiente terreno para contener su expresividad, hoy se entiende su dominio sobre la pared alrededor de la pieza central. Ya no es suficiente aprisionar la obra en un marco neutro. El marco es integrado a la obra, también los elementos aledaños. Si Keith Haring fue referente en los primeros años, hoy es Matta que obra detrás de los telones en su registro visual.
El mundo actual de Julián es más estático, un mundo pintado desde de su cerebro, no desde una representación abstraída del tema. Busca suspender el tiempo, dejarnos acercar a la obra en un marco atemporal. Nos devuelve al timing perenne del arte, sin la aceleración del video, la inmediatez del performance o la frialdad de la foto. Aceptar el desafío de Julián Prebisch es reencontrarse con la práctica de la contemplación. Esta muestra es una proeza de integración: de técnicas, materiales, espacios e imágenes. Comprueba que la pintura en si es válida todavía y en manos de jóvenes como Julián, con talento e imaginación, seguirá asombrándonos, como siempre.
Edward Shaw
Tunquén, Chile
septiembre - 2009
Quiénes venimos siguiendo la evolución de Julián Prebisch (1976) como artista, vemos en esta muestra una nueva apuesta, un nuevo desafío. Al abandonar los colores vivos y las imágenes sicodélicas, el joven artista entra en un nuevo universo, más personal, de búsqueda, de introspección, como queriendo resolver un enigma que lo perturba. Esta muestra refleja la profundidad de este proceso: revela su compromiso con el arte y la vida misma.
Los resultados de esta nueva mirada son inquietantes: la obra nos lleva a reconsiderar su evolución. El juego de la abstracción de las imágenes se acabó. El arco iris de Julián transita un túnel. Los colores primarios que blandeaba el artista como banderas africanas se opacaron. Los audaces matices de antes, hoy devuelven pastel, más mutados. También el clima de la obra se ha transformado; es más sutil, más hondo. Lo que en un principio fue una celebración, hoy es una reflexión, una indagación. Son otras las preocupaciones del artista en esta segunda muestra institucional.
Julián esta en medio de una búsqueda para encontrar su propia persona artística, su centro en un mundo que vira hacia la periferia. Toca temas que tienen su origen en ciertas prácticas relacionadas a la magia. Las ciencias ocultas corren por vetas que les acercan, cuando dadas vuelta, a la física cuántica. Julián se aproxima a su obra como un científico, un investigador en busca de descifrar una formula cuyos elementos resisten resolución. Avanza al ritmo de laboratorio, sin apurarse; repite experimentos hasta que el resultado le es satisfactorio.
Mientras que los demás de su generación encuentran sus municiones plásticas en el exterior, física y geográficamente, Julián excava las vetas de su ser. Buscar adentro de uno mismo es una faena dura y muchas veces dolorosa. Uno se encuentra con escombros y escollos que cuesta reconocer. Debe sortear los obstáculos y seguir más allá de la basura que aparece en cualquier auto-confrontación.
El Julián de hoy, entonces, camina sobre el filo de la navaja. Mantiene en equilibrio gracias a su talento natural y su disciplinada dedicación. Procura combinar su dominio natural de lo estético con la imaginería que ha escogido en esta instancia de su trayecto. Pone énfasis no solo en seleccionar con sumo cuidado la imagen, sino también sacar el jugo de una gran variedad de materiales. Va mezclando todo sobre la superficie de la tela y también fuera de su bastidor; integra los marcos a la obra y agrega objetos en pos de mini-instalación. Todo contribuye a enriquecer el trabajo visual y conceptualmente.
Si antes la obra sedujo el ojo con un baile alucinatorio, en este momento la sensación es puro pos-gótico. Su paleta es de tonos de tormenta, más negra que blanca en todo sentido. Sus figuras, cuando las haya, emergen de libros esotéricos, de estampas de magia, de mundos interiores que miden su marcha a través de símbolos y señales más allá de lo comúnmente vivido.
Trabaja cada obra desde tres ángulos. Primero, prepara un fondo, que puede parecer la superficie de un trozo de mármol, o los papeles pintados al interior de las tapas de un libro antiguo. Son trompe l’oeil que imitan a la naturaleza cuyos movimientos imitan líquidos en revolución. Descubrió que la Coca-Cola podría servir de medio en vez del agua al preparar los colores, y utilizó la popular bebida para lograr estas fluidas texturas plásticas.
Julián pone mucho énfasis y esfuerzo en este etapa inicial de la obra. Luego introduce la trama, que puede ser un objeto como un jarrón, un gallo, o un complejo diseño abstracto con reminiscencias arábicas, un patchwork de pequeños geometrías. A veces incorpora fragmentos de vidrio, de espejos para imponer ciertos ritmos, reflejos que busca. Termina la obra con un complejo marco y si hace falta, la complementa con algún elemento externo, relacionado con la dirección en la cuál él quiere enviar el ojo y la mente del espectador.
El Art Deco es un determinante en el mundo de Julián. Predomina en la decoración de sus espacios, en la trama de sus diseños y en su estética vital. Lo aplica en sus expresiones más formales, también se deja seducir por su aspecto degenerativo, el kitsch. El Deco da estructura a sus fondos, provee un marco visual que concentra la mirada. El kitsch aparece en la anécdota, esa manifestación del espíritu popular que se muestra en excesos y exageraciones.
Julián impregna todos sus cuadros con simbologías que a veces son auto-referentes. El receptor de sus mensajes necesita acostumbrarse a los códigos detrás de los títulos de las obras: se devuelven leíbles a mirar con cariño y cautela a las obras. Por ejemplo, cuando Julián sufre una pena de amor, pinta una paloma. Es parte de una poética personal que lo aleja de la banalidad de lo superficial. Sin embargo, la obra se defiende sin analizar la anécdota que se esconde detrás de la imagen.
Lo que más separa a Julián de sus pares es que parte de una actitud clásica. Tiene un tremendo respeto para lo que produce; postula llegar a la posteridad. Hay una pelea implícita en cualquier intento para acercarse a la perfección. Su carácter no permite medias tintas: la excelencia y la obsesión de obtenerla guían cada pincelada. Su ritmo es del caracol, de la tortuga: no siente, por ejemplo, los apuros de la liebre. Puede pasar una mañana en un trance evaluando el próximo paso, un día entero en buscar el objeto preciso para redondear una idea.
Busca sus materiales en los lugares más insólitos imaginables. Toma un conejo despellejado del freezer del restaurant peruano Chan Chan como modelo de un feto. Una cabeza de chancho colgada emblemáticamente en la carnecería le sirve de elemento pictórico. Busca fragmentos de piel o cuero en los talleres de peleteros en Boedo. Frecuenta las tiendas de santería y Umbanda.
Compra largas trenzas de pelo negro en el Barrio Chino. Cuelga las trenzas al lado de cuadros que representan las mismas trenzas, pintadas a la perfección. Así produce una transformación de un objeto orgánico a una imagen sin materia. Refiere con este juego de papeles a la presencia de la magia en el mundo que él arma a su alrededor. Su taller está repleto de posibles conversiones y relecturas.
De chico, Julián fue adicto al libro “Can I Play with Magic?”, un libro lúdico lleno de trucos de magia. Seguía su fascinación con lo oculto, pero siempre desde afuera, como mirón. “Soy un observador total del mundo sincrético.” Recalca que “me gusta la estética que tiene”. Viajó a Bolivia y frecuentó los mercados donde las curanderas le ofrecían un sinfín de materiales exóticos que luego podían encontrar lugar en la obra o en su imaginación. “Quiero recabar en cosas que no son comunes”.
Lo más esencial de esta historia es que Julián logra integrar e incorporar esta estética y sus manifestaciones materiales en su obra, sin perder su propia personalidad como artista. No logran dominarlo; pierden su cargo originario y parecen como un elemento más en la compleja construcción de la obra. Julián ejerce una suerte de magia cuando entremezcla sus elementos, como la bruja con sus cazuelas de hierbas y afines.
También pasó una estadía en Londres, donde se desarrolló otras facetas de su carácter y personalidad. Pudo observar el profesionalismo del artista en su máxima expresión. Se dio cuenta al volver a la Argentina que lo que tenía a su alcance en Buenos Aires nunca se acercaría a lo que un artista inglés tiene a su disposición. “Tengo que mover más la cabeza con los recursos y medios que tengo a mi alcance aquí”.
Tal vez el recurso más disponible y más único en el mundo de hoy en Buenos Aires es el tiempo. Julián lo usa a su manera; vivirlo a un ritmo propio es un lujo que no sería factible en Londres o Nueva York. Los cambios requieren tiempo, deben madurar sanamente. Julián es un solitario: “No puedo trabajar con otros en talleres o en equipos como en el cine,” dice. Estudió cine durante dos años, y arte también otros dos años. Pero su motivación viene más de sus viajes y sus propias especulaciones, que de la experiencia académica.
Julián trabaja en series, o mejor dicho, secuencias, donde una obra conduce a la próxima, su resolución proveyendo la punta de partida de la siguiente. Una trilogía, por ejemplo, está compuesta de “El aburrimiento del rey padre”, “Los caprichos de la reina” y “El orgullo del principito”. Por supuesto no hay una trama lineal entre los tres cuadros, pero hay algo en la primero que gatilla el siguiente, y así consecutivamente. Algunos títulos son alusivos: “La destrenzada”, “Equipo de mago”, “Chancho”, y otros son más bien sugestivos: “Matrimonio”, “El silencio” o “La primera y última fase del enamoramiento”.
La evolución de Julián ha seguido el trayecto del péndulo. Los colores vivaces desaparecieron, reemplazados por “tonos raros, con sutilezas”, en las palabras del artista. Las formas siguen una estructura arquitectónica con proyecciones personales. Los códigos del Art Deco disciplinan la composición. Las figuras emblemáticas de antes han caído ante una invasión de imágenes derivadas de su curiosidad actual.
Si antes el cuadro pintado fue suficiente terreno para contener su expresividad, hoy se entiende su dominio sobre la pared alrededor de la pieza central. Ya no es suficiente aprisionar la obra en un marco neutro. El marco es integrado a la obra, también los elementos aledaños. Si Keith Haring fue referente en los primeros años, hoy es Matta que obra detrás de los telones en su registro visual.
El mundo actual de Julián es más estático, un mundo pintado desde de su cerebro, no desde una representación abstraída del tema. Busca suspender el tiempo, dejarnos acercar a la obra en un marco atemporal. Nos devuelve al timing perenne del arte, sin la aceleración del video, la inmediatez del performance o la frialdad de la foto. Aceptar el desafío de Julián Prebisch es reencontrarse con la práctica de la contemplación. Esta muestra es una proeza de integración: de técnicas, materiales, espacios e imágenes. Comprueba que la pintura en si es válida todavía y en manos de jóvenes como Julián, con talento e imaginación, seguirá asombrándonos, como siempre.
Edward Shaw
Tunquén, Chile
septiembre - 2009
Bernardita Zegers: Hilando Fino - Interview (English)
Bernardita Zegers: Hilando Fino
Interview with Edward Shaw
ES: Why are you so attracted to change?
BZ: Change is natural for me. I always feel that I am changing, not only in my art but in each and every action of my life. Change can be legitimate or a pretext to justify one’s work when one makes abrupt shifts in direction without conviction. In my case, there are changes in my life that eventually produce changes in my work.
ES: Do you see art as static, or does it adapt itself to the times?
BZ: No, I don’t see art as static: each time we see the same work, it offers a new dialogue. I have a broader outlook, and today I don’t see art as something miraculous, as something to which one must render homage. My own vision is more balanced: art, nature, everyday life all have the same priority for me today. I am much less prejudiced in general. I can enjoy routine, look more deeply, apply the same enthusiasm and dedication to each action and that helps me to minimize the mystique that once upon a time I might have felt for Art as a personal challenge.
ES: Do you feel more comfortable now looking at your own work than you did before?
BZ: I feel more secure, more convinced: I am not afraid of the changes, but I don’t look for them either. They seem to appear like vegetables in season. One has to be alert to receive them and to apply them according to our own essence. I am constantly upbeat: it doesn’t matter to me if I am in the kitchen, at the sewing machine, at my work table, with a grandchild… Each new center of attention demands the same attitude, which in my case is a blend of love and responsibility.
ES: Do you believe you have the vocation to be an artist?
BZ: Yes, I have a vocation: what I don’t have is the emotional necessity to express myself all the time through art. But art has been the focal point, the backbone I have needed throughout my life. As I evolve, I always manage to focus myself again. On numerous occasions, art has been the central focus. Circumstances are what bring me to produce art. Today, for example, I do the St. Petersburg series with passion and commitment. But I realize that this is one more way station on the path of change.
ES: What was the professional criticism that most affected you?
BZ: I remember an encounter with an art critic many years ago. After looking at one of my paintings, he said, “This is a good picture. It can be hung in a corner somewhere.” I felt irritated at the moment, but today I realize: what more can an artist want? Not much more than people who hang one of your works in their home or office and, better yet, in a museum.
ES: Do you paint with your life, like Ximena Fernandez’s words at the beginning of the text suggest?
BZ: If to paint means to create, I definitely do ‘paint’ with my life. It is a frame of mind; I have no personal commitment to art, to painting. I am fascinated when I look at art, just as I am with nature and so many other things that one sees in one’s lifetime. My commitment is to do what I do the best I can, within the limits of my capacity. Whatever it is that I am doing is ultimately a commitment I have with myself. I don’t need to dress up like an artist to be an artist. Even though my work changes from decade to decade, my essence remains firm. What I do comes from my origins, from my gut. Formats can vary, themes and techniques too, but there is a binding connection that goes back to the beginnings. I have always felt bound to that connection.
Interview with Edward Shaw
ES: Why are you so attracted to change?
BZ: Change is natural for me. I always feel that I am changing, not only in my art but in each and every action of my life. Change can be legitimate or a pretext to justify one’s work when one makes abrupt shifts in direction without conviction. In my case, there are changes in my life that eventually produce changes in my work.
ES: Do you see art as static, or does it adapt itself to the times?
BZ: No, I don’t see art as static: each time we see the same work, it offers a new dialogue. I have a broader outlook, and today I don’t see art as something miraculous, as something to which one must render homage. My own vision is more balanced: art, nature, everyday life all have the same priority for me today. I am much less prejudiced in general. I can enjoy routine, look more deeply, apply the same enthusiasm and dedication to each action and that helps me to minimize the mystique that once upon a time I might have felt for Art as a personal challenge.
ES: Do you feel more comfortable now looking at your own work than you did before?
BZ: I feel more secure, more convinced: I am not afraid of the changes, but I don’t look for them either. They seem to appear like vegetables in season. One has to be alert to receive them and to apply them according to our own essence. I am constantly upbeat: it doesn’t matter to me if I am in the kitchen, at the sewing machine, at my work table, with a grandchild… Each new center of attention demands the same attitude, which in my case is a blend of love and responsibility.
ES: Do you believe you have the vocation to be an artist?
BZ: Yes, I have a vocation: what I don’t have is the emotional necessity to express myself all the time through art. But art has been the focal point, the backbone I have needed throughout my life. As I evolve, I always manage to focus myself again. On numerous occasions, art has been the central focus. Circumstances are what bring me to produce art. Today, for example, I do the St. Petersburg series with passion and commitment. But I realize that this is one more way station on the path of change.
ES: What was the professional criticism that most affected you?
BZ: I remember an encounter with an art critic many years ago. After looking at one of my paintings, he said, “This is a good picture. It can be hung in a corner somewhere.” I felt irritated at the moment, but today I realize: what more can an artist want? Not much more than people who hang one of your works in their home or office and, better yet, in a museum.
ES: Do you paint with your life, like Ximena Fernandez’s words at the beginning of the text suggest?
BZ: If to paint means to create, I definitely do ‘paint’ with my life. It is a frame of mind; I have no personal commitment to art, to painting. I am fascinated when I look at art, just as I am with nature and so many other things that one sees in one’s lifetime. My commitment is to do what I do the best I can, within the limits of my capacity. Whatever it is that I am doing is ultimately a commitment I have with myself. I don’t need to dress up like an artist to be an artist. Even though my work changes from decade to decade, my essence remains firm. What I do comes from my origins, from my gut. Formats can vary, themes and techniques too, but there is a binding connection that goes back to the beginnings. I have always felt bound to that connection.
Bernardita Zegers: Hilando Fino (English)
Hilando Fino
“What’s the matter with Bernardita, / She doesn’t want to paint any more? / That’s what those who don’t know her are saying. / Well, she never stopped painting. / Now she does it with life itself. / She passes her days painting and / She doesn’t do anything else / she paints her space, her meals, / Her toys, her very life.”
Ximena Fernandez, Tunquen, 2000
Bernardita Zegers has undertaken a path of decantation of techniques, materials and themes throughout the course of her career, seeking the most essential way to express her interior condition. Sensitive and candid, imaginative and playful, she goes complying with life’s rites of passage, one by one, discovering a renewed version of her own self after each stage is surmounted.
The new work of Bernardita Zegers transports the artist to unknown territory, both contextually and geographically. The transformations in her style emerge from a sensation of unconformity with the earlier stages and achievements in her career. She has not wanted to be trapped in her own past, recognizable and recognized.
She seeks her future in change. In order to continue to develop as a person and also as an artist, she abandoned painting, drawing, her robust figures, the striking colors, her self-referential imagery, all of the attributes that distinguished her earlier work.
She freed herself from the stress of concentration, her obsessive sense of dedication, the long hours spent before a sheet of paper, striving for the resolution and execution of the images her public applauded. Instead, she sought dispersion, awakening to new appetites, unfamiliar fields of action. She applied that same passion for painting to creating new recipes in the kitchen, inventing clothing on her sewing machine, integrating new acquisitions to the decor of her home, to travel, to reinvent herself as a grandmother/guide, among other roles. She delighted in generational renovation.
Premonitorily, in 1986 Chilean poet Diego Maquieira wrote of Zeger’s evolution: “It has been a long time since I have seen such power of expression transform itself into a way of life and give form and body to an artist’s work. More so, in work that is so far from the formula of grandiloquence and the recourse of repetition, so foolishly celebrated and ritualized by the dogmas of art and its specialists. I speak of the fecundity of experience above and beyond the sterility of experimentation.”
Bernardita recreated herself. Escape, in her case, led to finding herself. She prepared a series of objects composed of practical and banal elements, combined in dream-like playthings: unexpected juxtapositions, captured in boxes with found content, natural and man-made. The result: magical messages, poetic connections, a singular expressivity derived from the residue of other moments, other realities.
“On first contact with Bernardita’s work, I felt the presence of a South American Joseph Cornell, at once a collection of fantastic curiosities from ordinary life made extraordinary in their presentation and altered context, reliquary, votive, a religious sensibility distanced from the institution of religion. Rites and relics from a feminine center that encompasses a creational world. A physical and spiritual wisdom conjuring the trickster. Toys and dolls transduce innocence. Icons reconfigured transmute meanings.” That was Anney Bonne’s heartfelt reading.
The new work maintained the freshness and delicacy of her early paintings. She has added touches of humor, of nostalgia and childhood memories, also references to nature and the cycles that order the life of someone who lives in an environment where the closest neighbors are the sea and the wind, the sun and the nocturnal heavens.
Chilean artist Benjamin Lira wrote in the catalogue for the exhibit of those objects in 2005: “As slowly as the tempo of the tides of Tunquen and with the freedom of chance, a diversity of elements discover their potential on her work table, accommodate themselves, are decanted, and then evolve. The communion between the interconnected pieces empowers them, articulating their union, until the process produces the vibration of the birth of a new object, inserting itself, like a flash of lightning, in the surprising universe of poetry.”
The years of painting fantasies and constructing stories produced an artistic catharsis. She had converted thoughts into things and emotions into three-dimensional images. She gathered an arsenal of materials, the nucleus for a modest municipal museum. Novelty again grew into habit, the danger of repetition became a reality. She once again sought novelty in what was closest to her emotionally: her home, her husband, her daughters, her grandchildren and her mother, in the kitchen, inventing new dishes, at her sewing machine, in visits to the flea markets in Santiago and Valparaiso, in the most simplest of experiences during her trips to the United States and Europe. Her imagination found nourishment from new sources. She continued her process of globalization, without losing the domesticity of her center.
Among the unusual things that her husband brought with him to Chile, Zegers found a thick portfolio of antique engravings executed by French engraver J. E. Thierry in 1810: over 150 images on verge paper of plans for public buildings drawn by an Italian/Swiss architect at the end of the 18th century in St. Petersburg. A dozen prints were missing from the collection, so it had little bibliographical or documental value in its incomplete state. The author, Luigi I. Rusca (1762-1822), was named Architect to the Court of Czar Alexander I in 1802. After studying in Italy, in 1783 he was called by Czarina Catherine the Great to St. Petersburg at the age of 21 to become an assistant of Giacomo Quarenghi. In 1790 he began to design palaces, schools, military buildings, churches, libraries, even a mosque. He was named to the Academy of Arts in 1815 in recognition of his work as an architect, city planner, decorator and furniture designer. The French-made engravings form the catalogue-raisonne of his remarkable creations.
Rusca alluded to “a certain simplicity of character and propriety” in his Russian buildings. The majestic dimensions of his projects regain human scale in the prints, thanks to the clarity of purpose registered in his architectural plans, projections, and elevations. It was precisely this straight forward directness in his presentation that caught Zeger’s fancy on examining the engravings. She found a solid backdrop upon which she could express what the work made her feel in relation to time and the essential dimension of the sublime.
She decided to utilize the static architectural images as the starting point of a work of her own. The question was: how to do it? She observed them, studied them, divided them into categories. She discarded many impulses. She juggled with ideas. The project pricked her imagination like a thorn in the sole of her foot. She could not get the challenging possibility out of her mind. She began to gather elements that would provide the flat surface of the plan with a third dimension. She invented situations, vignettes. She wanted to maintain a connection with the original history: the glory of Czarist Russia, the splendor of the world created by Peter the Great, the legendary city which exploded into magnificence in the latter part of the 18th century.
In a trip to the United States, she visited the city of St. Petersburg on the Gulf of Mexico in Florida, now a beachside paradise for pensioners from the North. She imagined joining the two versions of an identical name. The Florida version had been invented by Peter Demens, a Russian immigrant, in the 19th century and grew in faux-imperial luxury until the Great Depression of 1929. The testimonies that she found of the stately period of the city’s history were for the most part kitsch memorabilia designed for decades of tourists: postcards, posters, key chains, ashtrays, etc.
She purchased these testimonial treasures, as well as a number of small objects with which she could construct a world atop the rigid lines of the Imperial Russian architectural plans. In Europe she found old spindles with thread, textile fragments, buttons, little figures, and then in Buenos Aires, antique postcards. She returned home with an infernal mass of material. She faced the same problem as before: how to integrate the material onto the sheets of ancient cotton paper, so noble and strong, so austere and frugal?
The essence of the plans had become part of her being. She began with the theme of St. Petersburg, Florida. She blended twin readings for the two cities: the original majestic, the New World version superficial. The viewer can sense the contrasts in the juxtaposing of materials and attitudes. There were postcards of typical landmarks, two inch-tall ballerinas in Bakelite, a horse, a mouse, all intermingled in codes that only the artist could decipher. The combination of esthetics enriched the two propositions, giving a playful vitality to the historic raw material, that Parisian paper made two centuries ago.
She prepared a series of work following these guidelines until she began to question her direction once again. She tired of what she felt was the triviality of making up visual stories. She sought something more subtle, less anecdotal. She stopped working on the prints for quite a while. She kept on ruminating, meditating, without find the thread with which to tie the past to the future.
All of a sudden, one day, it appeared: thread in itself would be the cord to bind the angles of approach. She began by tying points of reference with antique thread of the same colors used to paint the buildings of Imperial St. Petersburg at the time of its blossoming. She crisscrossed the paper’s surface with seams, with lines of tensed thread joining one point with another, establishing natural links between the different perspectives in the plan. One of her discoveries in the United States stood out over all other materials. She found a basket filled with spindles from a textile mill in an antique shop in Upstate New York. The colors of the thread matched to perfection the tones of the ancient palaces of St. Petersburg.
She connected a detail of an elevation to its equivalent on the floor plan, uniting projections, for example, of the same window. The artifice created a dynamic effect that rivets our attention. When tensing the thread, the paper wrinkled slightly, permitting the play of shadows across the surface. She produced a disturbing effect between the immobile black lines of the original and the constellations of thread that danced above the plane. The result is a geometric poem, where the superimposed textures establish dialogues with the architect’s lines. The color of the threads enriches the connection, since the harmonious tones are the same as those of the original, still-to-be-built walls.
The work achieves a tension that vibrates before the observing eye. The mind does not capture the meaning, because there is no need for one. It is a game of sensibilities, of renovations, of bridges in time and space. Paper and inks from the 18th century, threads of the Industrial Age, one sharing space with the other. The result is a work that can be totally anonymous, if the viewer does not know the references: just an example of dexterity applied to an esthetic exercise. With the pertinent information, the context grants an added value to the reading, opening dialogues that begin with Russian history and traverse time to today, when an artist decides to impregnate this motionless scene on a sheet of paper with life, with color, with the poetry of a search successfully concluded.
Edward Shaw
Tunquen – January 2010
“What’s the matter with Bernardita, / She doesn’t want to paint any more? / That’s what those who don’t know her are saying. / Well, she never stopped painting. / Now she does it with life itself. / She passes her days painting and / She doesn’t do anything else / she paints her space, her meals, / Her toys, her very life.”
Ximena Fernandez, Tunquen, 2000
Bernardita Zegers has undertaken a path of decantation of techniques, materials and themes throughout the course of her career, seeking the most essential way to express her interior condition. Sensitive and candid, imaginative and playful, she goes complying with life’s rites of passage, one by one, discovering a renewed version of her own self after each stage is surmounted.
The new work of Bernardita Zegers transports the artist to unknown territory, both contextually and geographically. The transformations in her style emerge from a sensation of unconformity with the earlier stages and achievements in her career. She has not wanted to be trapped in her own past, recognizable and recognized.
She seeks her future in change. In order to continue to develop as a person and also as an artist, she abandoned painting, drawing, her robust figures, the striking colors, her self-referential imagery, all of the attributes that distinguished her earlier work.
She freed herself from the stress of concentration, her obsessive sense of dedication, the long hours spent before a sheet of paper, striving for the resolution and execution of the images her public applauded. Instead, she sought dispersion, awakening to new appetites, unfamiliar fields of action. She applied that same passion for painting to creating new recipes in the kitchen, inventing clothing on her sewing machine, integrating new acquisitions to the decor of her home, to travel, to reinvent herself as a grandmother/guide, among other roles. She delighted in generational renovation.
Premonitorily, in 1986 Chilean poet Diego Maquieira wrote of Zeger’s evolution: “It has been a long time since I have seen such power of expression transform itself into a way of life and give form and body to an artist’s work. More so, in work that is so far from the formula of grandiloquence and the recourse of repetition, so foolishly celebrated and ritualized by the dogmas of art and its specialists. I speak of the fecundity of experience above and beyond the sterility of experimentation.”
Bernardita recreated herself. Escape, in her case, led to finding herself. She prepared a series of objects composed of practical and banal elements, combined in dream-like playthings: unexpected juxtapositions, captured in boxes with found content, natural and man-made. The result: magical messages, poetic connections, a singular expressivity derived from the residue of other moments, other realities.
“On first contact with Bernardita’s work, I felt the presence of a South American Joseph Cornell, at once a collection of fantastic curiosities from ordinary life made extraordinary in their presentation and altered context, reliquary, votive, a religious sensibility distanced from the institution of religion. Rites and relics from a feminine center that encompasses a creational world. A physical and spiritual wisdom conjuring the trickster. Toys and dolls transduce innocence. Icons reconfigured transmute meanings.” That was Anney Bonne’s heartfelt reading.
The new work maintained the freshness and delicacy of her early paintings. She has added touches of humor, of nostalgia and childhood memories, also references to nature and the cycles that order the life of someone who lives in an environment where the closest neighbors are the sea and the wind, the sun and the nocturnal heavens.
Chilean artist Benjamin Lira wrote in the catalogue for the exhibit of those objects in 2005: “As slowly as the tempo of the tides of Tunquen and with the freedom of chance, a diversity of elements discover their potential on her work table, accommodate themselves, are decanted, and then evolve. The communion between the interconnected pieces empowers them, articulating their union, until the process produces the vibration of the birth of a new object, inserting itself, like a flash of lightning, in the surprising universe of poetry.”
The years of painting fantasies and constructing stories produced an artistic catharsis. She had converted thoughts into things and emotions into three-dimensional images. She gathered an arsenal of materials, the nucleus for a modest municipal museum. Novelty again grew into habit, the danger of repetition became a reality. She once again sought novelty in what was closest to her emotionally: her home, her husband, her daughters, her grandchildren and her mother, in the kitchen, inventing new dishes, at her sewing machine, in visits to the flea markets in Santiago and Valparaiso, in the most simplest of experiences during her trips to the United States and Europe. Her imagination found nourishment from new sources. She continued her process of globalization, without losing the domesticity of her center.
Among the unusual things that her husband brought with him to Chile, Zegers found a thick portfolio of antique engravings executed by French engraver J. E. Thierry in 1810: over 150 images on verge paper of plans for public buildings drawn by an Italian/Swiss architect at the end of the 18th century in St. Petersburg. A dozen prints were missing from the collection, so it had little bibliographical or documental value in its incomplete state. The author, Luigi I. Rusca (1762-1822), was named Architect to the Court of Czar Alexander I in 1802. After studying in Italy, in 1783 he was called by Czarina Catherine the Great to St. Petersburg at the age of 21 to become an assistant of Giacomo Quarenghi. In 1790 he began to design palaces, schools, military buildings, churches, libraries, even a mosque. He was named to the Academy of Arts in 1815 in recognition of his work as an architect, city planner, decorator and furniture designer. The French-made engravings form the catalogue-raisonne of his remarkable creations.
Rusca alluded to “a certain simplicity of character and propriety” in his Russian buildings. The majestic dimensions of his projects regain human scale in the prints, thanks to the clarity of purpose registered in his architectural plans, projections, and elevations. It was precisely this straight forward directness in his presentation that caught Zeger’s fancy on examining the engravings. She found a solid backdrop upon which she could express what the work made her feel in relation to time and the essential dimension of the sublime.
She decided to utilize the static architectural images as the starting point of a work of her own. The question was: how to do it? She observed them, studied them, divided them into categories. She discarded many impulses. She juggled with ideas. The project pricked her imagination like a thorn in the sole of her foot. She could not get the challenging possibility out of her mind. She began to gather elements that would provide the flat surface of the plan with a third dimension. She invented situations, vignettes. She wanted to maintain a connection with the original history: the glory of Czarist Russia, the splendor of the world created by Peter the Great, the legendary city which exploded into magnificence in the latter part of the 18th century.
In a trip to the United States, she visited the city of St. Petersburg on the Gulf of Mexico in Florida, now a beachside paradise for pensioners from the North. She imagined joining the two versions of an identical name. The Florida version had been invented by Peter Demens, a Russian immigrant, in the 19th century and grew in faux-imperial luxury until the Great Depression of 1929. The testimonies that she found of the stately period of the city’s history were for the most part kitsch memorabilia designed for decades of tourists: postcards, posters, key chains, ashtrays, etc.
She purchased these testimonial treasures, as well as a number of small objects with which she could construct a world atop the rigid lines of the Imperial Russian architectural plans. In Europe she found old spindles with thread, textile fragments, buttons, little figures, and then in Buenos Aires, antique postcards. She returned home with an infernal mass of material. She faced the same problem as before: how to integrate the material onto the sheets of ancient cotton paper, so noble and strong, so austere and frugal?
The essence of the plans had become part of her being. She began with the theme of St. Petersburg, Florida. She blended twin readings for the two cities: the original majestic, the New World version superficial. The viewer can sense the contrasts in the juxtaposing of materials and attitudes. There were postcards of typical landmarks, two inch-tall ballerinas in Bakelite, a horse, a mouse, all intermingled in codes that only the artist could decipher. The combination of esthetics enriched the two propositions, giving a playful vitality to the historic raw material, that Parisian paper made two centuries ago.
She prepared a series of work following these guidelines until she began to question her direction once again. She tired of what she felt was the triviality of making up visual stories. She sought something more subtle, less anecdotal. She stopped working on the prints for quite a while. She kept on ruminating, meditating, without find the thread with which to tie the past to the future.
All of a sudden, one day, it appeared: thread in itself would be the cord to bind the angles of approach. She began by tying points of reference with antique thread of the same colors used to paint the buildings of Imperial St. Petersburg at the time of its blossoming. She crisscrossed the paper’s surface with seams, with lines of tensed thread joining one point with another, establishing natural links between the different perspectives in the plan. One of her discoveries in the United States stood out over all other materials. She found a basket filled with spindles from a textile mill in an antique shop in Upstate New York. The colors of the thread matched to perfection the tones of the ancient palaces of St. Petersburg.
She connected a detail of an elevation to its equivalent on the floor plan, uniting projections, for example, of the same window. The artifice created a dynamic effect that rivets our attention. When tensing the thread, the paper wrinkled slightly, permitting the play of shadows across the surface. She produced a disturbing effect between the immobile black lines of the original and the constellations of thread that danced above the plane. The result is a geometric poem, where the superimposed textures establish dialogues with the architect’s lines. The color of the threads enriches the connection, since the harmonious tones are the same as those of the original, still-to-be-built walls.
The work achieves a tension that vibrates before the observing eye. The mind does not capture the meaning, because there is no need for one. It is a game of sensibilities, of renovations, of bridges in time and space. Paper and inks from the 18th century, threads of the Industrial Age, one sharing space with the other. The result is a work that can be totally anonymous, if the viewer does not know the references: just an example of dexterity applied to an esthetic exercise. With the pertinent information, the context grants an added value to the reading, opening dialogues that begin with Russian history and traverse time to today, when an artist decides to impregnate this motionless scene on a sheet of paper with life, with color, with the poetry of a search successfully concluded.
Edward Shaw
Tunquen – January 2010
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