2024.4.12 - Sandra Vásquez de la Horra

 

Six Symbioses

Today I went to a new exhibit at the local museum dedicated to a single Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra.  Overall I can't say I was much impressed, but it's worth expanding on that impression as well.

First, the good.  In her early career she did a variety of works inspired by biology, specifically human and plant anatomy.  Obviously I'm biased toward this topic, but even more I was in a position to appreciate it: I recognized what she was drawing, but not only did I recognize it I could also appreciate how she had accentuated it.  Take for instance this early 1986 trio called Fertile Days, Ovulations, and The Voyage:

These are depictions of real processes... but given a kind of accentuation and drama.  The first (my favorite), where the sperm are all converting on the egg to fertilize it, is dramatic without being inaccurate.  There's a tangible energy to it, that here at the start of a life, as it were, we can feel that something remarkable is happening.  The black and white with streaks also imparts a sense of both the electron micrograph and the cosmic, and in tying these impressions together it manages to impart human meaning without requiring the fantastical or mythological.

The second somewhat continues this, although with a structure that less implies movement than just capturing a moment where the egg moves down the fallopian tube on the right.  The third is in a slightly different style, but I think it uses it well with the darkening whorls in the middle imparting a cave-like darkness, a mysterious chasm, in the general shape of a fruitful tuber.

In all three of these my theme is the same: this is what scientific art should be like.  An artist has looked at these images of our new world, a world occurring at scales we cannot normally see and so do not have conventional symbols for, and bridged the gap to comprehensibility by giving the events a kind of meaning we can grasp.  And, most importantly, she has done so without resorting to direct anthropomorphization, which in my view is a death knell.  It is patently obvious that we do not live in a human world, and just as we cannot any longer take human-shaped gods seriously neither can we really feel that portraying the natural world as human is getting at its core.

Now, I would like to continue to praise her but it seems to me that after this early burst of ideas she lost some of that focus.  For instance, here's a piece from later:

The human head she draws is interesting, for it has the nose and lips of flesh but the back shape of a stripped and detached skull.  Add in the representation of the cavity for the brain (the title being, "The Brain of the Operation") along with the branching pattern of the nerves, and again it's clear that she has studied anatomy.  The overall impression is fairly lucid: here is a human, an embodied organic nature, like unto a fresh pepper.  It does give you a slightly fleshy feeling, doesn't it?

But what are all these other cartoon human heads doing?  This is where I feel it goes wrong.  The presence of the one head was already forced, but the rest strike me as excessive.  We're starting to wander from humanizing newer concepts into the older thought habit of correspondence.  "Humans are living things like peppers" becomes somehow transmuted into thinking that one has found a greater significance by being able to represent one of them by another.  Take for instance this yet later piece:

Los Hermafroditas (2023)

It's kinda Georgia O'Keefe-y.  We've got a cross-section of a uterus fused with that of a flower, a wavy border of broad ligament adorning the edges like the riffles in petals.  It's really quite clever, and I got a a kick out of standing in front of it and appreciating how she had merged the two images.

However, the heads show up again, as if interrupting to force the issue.  There's also the creeping oddity of the checkerboard pattern at the bottom; I don't even understand what that's about, and to my sensibilities its completely inorganic character clashes terribly with the rest of the image (I can't help but also note that although she has titled the work Hermaphrodite, she has illustrated a pistil, the female organ in flowers).  Something about this no longer has the same force or clarity as the older version, wandering into the human habit of just putting human parts on things because it feels natural.  This reaches an apex in the latest of her artworks:

Transformaciones (2023)

Now we've just got plants in humans, little flowers representing the fallopian tubes and veined pads the mammary fat (again, well-observed from an anatomical angle), but to me the force is just gone.  It's the same thing you see a thousand times over, the softheaded faux-primitive merging of human and plant into ideas of growth and life force.  In the meantime, her modern art conceits have just grown and the splotches of pattern, the detached and discolored leg, and the hole (?) in her palm just interrupt the sense of anything reasonable.  It's the same threadbare trick where confusing images, ones that surprise your optical system and force you to stop to reconsider the picture, are misconstrued as challenging or insightful; you have to pause and figure both of these things out, but one has substance and the other does not.  And I see nothing here, sorry.

This is really the summary of most of the exhibit, where the rest was composed of various semi-grotesque Latin American images, cobbles of human heads and skulls in various combinations that were just doodles, and a series of women-as-mountains.  The last to me were the height of the error; saying one identifies with the "The Earth Mother", and then drawing the landscape as though it were a human, is merely animism, perhaps our lowest form of thought and to me completely uninteresting.

However, because I really dislike ending on low notes, she did a few early (1993) landscapes which were free of this, and which I thought had their own charm:

Atacama Desert with its muted, earthy colors offset with pale turquoise, anchored in the center by an oddly evocative pyramidal mountain.

Atacama Landscape which continues the trend, but adds this expressive tree and accentuating objects, such that we are no longer staring from high above but now amongst it, peering beneath the bough to capture this image.

And finally Moon Valley which is getting pretty abstract, yet has a kind of melodiousness with the receding crescents that become fuller as they reach the sky.  I'm not sure what else to say about this except that in terms of simple color and organization it earns its keep from me.

So yeah, I really liked this woman's core.  I thought she had a great visual sense in many of these paintings, the background necessary to make some of her drawings feel relevant, but that over the decades she has been drawn off into worse and worse directions, and that both her thought and her art have suffered as a result.

2024.04.01 - BYU Art Museum

 

Silver Chalice with Roses - Julian Alden Weir, 1882

A week and a half ago when I was visiting home (Utah) I dropped by the BYU Art Museum.  I can't recommend their permanent art collection, but the temporary exhibit on Spanish and Latin art was worth seeing.  It went chronologically, and admittedly it started weak.  A few scattered artifacts of Bell Beaker Culture (pottery is unusually durable and so many early cultures are named after their pottery styles since that's how we even know they existed), but nothing that you'd appreciate without specialist knowledge.

Reaching the middle periods they had some El Greco and Velazquez but they weren't the most impressive samples either.  However, I was inspired to take a picture of this odd work:

The Wedding at Cana - Nicolás de Correa, 1696

 
It's a Mexican piece from the late 1600s about the wedding at Cana, but what was remarkable about it is that it was painted on wood with inlaid mother-of-pearl.  It was mildly three-dimensional with a texture unlike anything I've ever seen, a painting-mosaic-collage.  You can see what an unusual effect it has on the style, and while it ultimately felt a bit "off" as a painting I would love to see more examples of this "enonchados" style.

Setting aside a few decent portraits and such the next thing that caught my eye wasn't until Goya:

Pedro Mocarte - Goya, 1805

 Now, I'm generally not much of a Goya fan.  He strikes me as genuinely misanthropic and deranged.  His famous painting of Saturn devouring his children originally had a giant, erect phallus and he had it hung in his dining room to look at while he was eating.  Yeah, I think something went wrong in this guy.

However, here I think his "pessimistic" style worked.  This was a portrait of a friend who had been going through hard times, a professional musician and chorister who (like Goya himself) was losing his hearing.  The Spanish have always had a very peasant-earthy feel to their art, never getting far away from the body and its flaws, and it comes through in full here as this sad man is betrayed by his own.  Which really links to the next painting by Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta:

The Penitents - Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta, 1908

 This is a painting of a Spanish religious, err, festival, where that Christ is a wooden statue.  The penitents, the two guys without shirts, in order to show mortification of the flesh whip themselves until bloody.  There is something so ritualistically ghoulish about it, from the mask the front man wears to the way the old woman in the back left has her hands crossed in unmoved appreciation and approval of the goings on.  Combined with the very Spanish sense of the everyman (none of these people's faces are idealized, and very much lined by age and imperfection) it's one of those paintings that I can't say I like but which nonetheless conveys such a sense of the zealous Catholic devotion that runs through the culture.

On the wall just facing this was a family portrait by the same guy:

The Family of the Bullfighter, 1903

 I must remark on what a good choice this was by the museum.  While it's natural because both of these are by the same person, they also serve to show very contrasting elements within the culture.  You'd see the first above and think they're all serious psychos, moving around in dull cultish robes.  But here you get that other element that springs from what you could call "peasant simplicity", not simple faith but a simple vitality.  Nothing idealized about any of these people either, and indeed it just has a slight ramshackle look that, say, an Italian painting of a family wouldn't have.  Even if they'd accept realistic they would never accept undignified, but that's what we've got here with one dude smiling at the "camera" while the other is making a somewhat silly face at the girl on the right.

Which her dress was really a marvel to behold in person.  There's this interesting thing that's remarked on in the history of European art that color has a hit-or-miss relationship with our sense of intellect.  In general, we tend to be slightly suspicious of it, as something that affects the emotions directly rather than traveling through understanding first (relevant to our recent short-film discussions @nyy).  In this way very intellectual works tend to be colorless, like marbles, or the color is often subservient to form in a way that should never distract from it; even great colorists like the Venetians were careful with it.  But this simple riot of color here is just what people enjoy seeing, it's what you actually experienced when you walked around Athens in its day (all the statues were painted) as well as what many of the cathedrals looked like in their day.

 So in this way there's just something lively about it that again is related to the more peasant way of life, and to me that girl on the right encapsulated it with her dress - a dress that is frilled without being fancy, relatively simple without being spare.  It's just really pretty and she wears it well (there was a painting I didn't take a picture of with a British woman wearing that a similar dress and... she did not wear it well; being too prim in such a thing makes one look like you're just dressing up).  I really took the picture just for her, the rest was a bonus.

But again to give yet another contrast, this was a heavy painting from the north the Basque area by a guy named Solana:

Mariners of Castro Urdiales - José Gutiérrez Solana, 1915-1917

 If above we have the riotous Mediterranean life, here we have the colder Atlantic struggle.  This was possibly my favorite painting there, because in its colors and its structure it just spoke of salt-sprayed wood.  These people aren't miserable but they are a bit harder, a bit more used to storms that has weathered this entire group that could have been carved from driftwood rather than painted.  It almost smells like the fish.  Perhaps my enthusiasm is not carried off well here with only a picture, but I spent more time in front of this than any other.

The last few I have here are a bit of a mix.  One was a late painting by a guy named Isidre Nonell y Monturiol who unfortunately passed away in his late 30s just as he was beginning to hit it big:

La Roser - Isidre Nonell y Monturiol, 1909

 What is really delightful about this painting is just how large he has made the brush strokes across the cloak and hair to give them texture, yet how unobtrusive the technique is to immediately grasping the image.  The hair in particular looks like it has mass to it; look at it, it seems like it's a solid unit in the painting, a helmet set off so strongly against the simply-rendered but clear features of the woman.  And there, tracing the boundary where the two meet, you can't help but savor how smooth her skin is.  Which the expression itself is like the final touch to this, an indeterminate feeling, not happy, not sad, but perhaps with a sense of thoughtfulness.  She's not a dummy or a doll sitting for this painting and we would have to spend longer with her to know why she feels the way she does.

Somewhat strangely next to this was a work about some Moors driving slaves up a hill:

 

Arabs Ascending a Hill - Mariano Fortuny Marsal, c1864/66-1872

Looking at it in my picture it really fails to give the sense that it does in person.  This painting is in whirling, Impressionistic motion.  Despite the grim topic the sky has all the feeling of one of those beautiful, tumultuous spring days where it's perhaps just a little too cool to be outside without a jacket.  Yet you want to be out anyway because the air is clear, with that fresh, moist content that reminds you that this blue patch is perhaps only between life-giving storms.  The central figure, a Moroccan driving the captives, has his whole garb caught up in the winds, the cloak flying up around him.  Which you can see how then it all goes together; despite the clouds being in the upper right, the thrust up the painting is to the upper left, where the cloak is pointing and where you can feel both the people and the wind moving . The result is that the painting has this cyclonic motion, where you know the wind blows from the upper right, but it ends in the upper left after it has to have passed through the middle, and somehow all doing this transparently without having to curve the paint itself to emphasize it.  Again, despite the topic, this was such a thoroughly enlivening painting to experience.

Which on this Impressionistic, happy note, I'd like to end with a few from a guy named Sorolla:

 

Louis Comfort Tiffany - Jaoquin Sorolla y Bastida, 1911

What a great portrait this is of Mr. Tiffany (son of the fashion company fame).  It's just... so many European portraits are so painfully dull, with flat backgrounds focusing just only on the sitter's face or upper body.  Here you've got this extended sense that this man is in his element of beautiful things, enjoying the color and the canine companionship, without a whiff of pretension concerning his painting.  Sure it makes him look artistic, but that's almost, like, unnecessary to explain that this guy likes beautiful things considering what he's surrounded with.  This was also a rather large painting too (~2m across, I'd estimate), which just gave it an expansive element.  We might not be peering into the subtleties of this man's psyche like a Rembrandt would give, but we do get just a charming glimpse of his character.

The other Sorolla that caught my eye was a beach scene:

After the Bath, 1908

 He's apparently famous for beach paintings (I'd never heard of him before this, just speaking from minimal research since).  Lots of naked kids, which again is so very Spanish; little bodies running around.  But here this is such a great composition whose accompanying plaque added a lot to the appreciation: what looks natural is not.  That is, Sorolla has completely convinced us that this is just a casual event that he glimpsed, but we can actually trace the girl's pose back to a Greek statue (her dress is practically a toga), and the gesture of the boy putting the cloth around her has a similar structure to the one being thrown around Venus in Botticelli's famous Birth of Venus.

Why these are so fascinating is not just to show off knowledge of influences or "intertexuality", but in how he's drawn on them to also create his perspective on the girl.  I have a long discussion on female nudes, or female semi-nudes, in art, but the short version here is that Sorolla is looking to really evoke a bit of feminine beauty without sliding too far into sex.  That is so hard to do, and you can see the scattered failures throughout the history of art that either aren't evocative at all or are just a bit squick-y when it comes to admiring the female form (I'm looking at you Cranach the Elder).  But the Greek original was highly intellectual, a product of balanced form, and Botticelli's Venus was the most extraordinary attempt to marry the chaste Christian Mary with the amorous strumpet of antiquity.  So standing on these pillars, and using the everyman-effect that Impressionism brings to its subject, he's removed this ideal female from mythology and placed her right on the beach, sunbrowned in the Spanish sun but still beautiful.