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Ricardo Pau-Llosa (english)
EMERGENCE AS CREATIVITY
By Ricardo Pau-Llosa
Abstraction in the twentieth century has become associated with a variety
of reductions whose aim was to remove unnecessary references from visual
discourse.
At best, reference was seen as clutter; at worst, as a menace to visual
truth. The platonic aesthetics of reduction, central to modernism, have
continued in the postmodernism idiom--reverence (I.e. enshrinement of premises
) by defiance. The abstract, a term by now thoroughly tattered, -Still haunts
its euphemistic heirs, regardless of their deconstructionist pedigrees.
Modernist, platonic abstraction remains the ghost which moves behind the
ultimate postmodernism reduction--hat of stile, that of the artist proper
As long as innovation continues to be judged by implicit or explicit reductivist
strategies, we will be in the orbit of cubists, formalists and constructivists.
Perhaps not a bad orbit to be in, alter all. Eva Jawerbaum's art, at first
glance, seems to be exquisitely comfortable with traveling along that orbit.
On initial approach to her works, we seem to be in the presence of a cerebral
hedonist who has reconciled the formalist]s interest in the action of shapes
and colors with the sensualist's lust for surface. These initial findings,
though not misguided, may keep us from observing something much more important
about this artist's work, and that has to do with the genesis of what might
otherwise be labeled "abstract" in her work.
Abstraction in Jawerbaum emerges. It is part off a process by which two
processes--conception and execution—become one and not just contrapuntal.
As a master of genera mixta, Jawerbaum brings together aspects of painting
and assemblage under the aegis diverse printmaking techniques. Each of her
works is a one-of-a-kind, but they are not monotypes. They are intensely
crafted works in (as opposed to "on " ) paper which emerge from
tier direct action upon the materials. Printing techniques here are truly
an instrument of a personal creative process.
Jawerbaum's work's emerge from this one process which fuses two other process—conception
and execution. For all the rhetoric of action and matter-as-image, non-referential
art (say of the abstract-expressionist variety) is still referential. If
nothing else, it resembles (or parodies) music's ability to evoke, or perhaps
recreate, emotionally charged intuitive states of awareness.
At time the modernist lyrical-abstract work has been charged with the job
of transmitting the artist's presumed intuitive state to the viewer, which
reduces the work to a kind of emotion-stimulating code. Even this is nobler
than pondering the work as a mystical confrontation with pigment-as-sole-image
or with the fiction of painting qua action, as if either reduction were
truly profound.
In the lyrical-abstract mode, whether the referent is found within the artist
o within some universal menu of intuitions, it is safe to affirm one thing:
evocation may be oblique or timid reference, but it is still reference.
For all the beauty and emotional of Jawerbaum's work, there is no intuitive
referentiallity in it, no pretense of passing the torch of unspoken awareness.
The emotional realm that emanates clearly from Jawerbaum's works comes from
a genuine quieting of the artist as oracular or demiurgical personality
and allowing the creative process itself to reveal its proper and natural
orientation toward personality--the artist as well as that of the viewer.
It is the building up of texture, the almost sculptural intimacy of this
artist with the matter and process of creation, which liberates her work
from the lyrical-abstract and its reductivist traps. Which is to say, this
process of building up and emergence is what makes Jawerbaum's work powerful.
There is no small degree of irony in the fact that intimacy with surface
and matter should be what liberates her work from reduction and the fantasies
of intuitive transmission.
The irony is deliciously augmented when we consider the importance of the
various printmaking techniques Jawerbaum employs, and further irony in knowing
she produces singular piece with these techniques.
The printmaking techniques recall the pressures of earth on Stone and organic
matter, the brute machinery of nature. Abstraction emerges in Jawerbaum,
which is to say it is part of the process itself. This sense of emergence
recalls Aristotelian organicism, by which unity and compact relevance become
the criteria, for beauty and meaningfulness. It also recalls Jungian and
post-Jungian analyses of gendering in poetic action. Reduction Is clearly
Apollonian and springs from the male principle. Emergence, organic unity,
fusion of conception and execution fall within the realm of the Dionysian
and the female principle. This is not to let the lyrical in the through
the back door.
Jawerbaum's work is rich in emotional and visual resonances, but these are
not linked to either a cult of the artistic personality as referential oracle,
nor to the cult of human action over passive matter. Both these cults are
linked to lyrical-reductivist modernism and, by premise-enshrining defiance,
to the Babel of postmodernism with its affected lack of skill, its pompous
relish of triviality and the ephemeral, its posed derision of beauty, its
calculated obscurity, and the masking of its ignorance of ideas through
the purposely clumsy appropriation of tangled references.
The emotional charge of Jawerbaum's works, like her abstraction, emerges.
It presents itself as an indistinguishable, elegant, organic part of the
presence and process of the work.
We see no scars of something torn away by reductivist purity. On the contrary
we see expansion and inclusion of subtle, deep references to the fundamentals
of consciousness. The textures, not to mention the scroll-like dimensions
of some of her works, also evoke the action of time in ways: which coalesce
the personal temporality of the artist (through the process which produced
these works) and time on a broad, universal and conceptual scale.
Time writes, paints, carves, and composes. Its marking, are not a language:
while they are not random, they are essentially unpredictable.
Its marking emerge, and somehow they communicate presence, the presence
of what has passed. This is the emotional core of Jawerbaum's work, linked
to the way time speaks to us, in the creative process, in the adventure
of living, in the solemn contemplation of our finite condition, and in the
clinging to the power to create things of beauty as an affirmation of our
dignity.
Ricardo Pau-Llosa (2009)
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