Pictorial work

To create forms means to live
Wassily Kandinsky

Since the first years of this century, the general conditions of the contemporary man has been intertwined with a transcendental need of explaining (to himself) and explain the world (itself). Metaphysical anxiety seems to be present in man's global condition and the art movements of our time start to be conscious-- beginning with abstract expressionism-- of this anxiety that permeates almost every relation of man with his environment and, as a consequence, with himself. Many a question has come forth since the appearance of the first modern art tendencies, which have always implied man's spiritual condition, (its relation with) nature and its transformation as expressed by the human psyche.

Since expressionism is a deliberate revelation of this metaphysical anxiety already existing in all the span of modern art*s spiritual tension, this revelation is the fundamental and inner support of any artistic expression based upon the animic gestuality of what is imponderable and hidden in the human spirit.

Ofelia Iszaevich whose spiritual tensions lie at the outermost of her "metaphysical anxiety", and with the capability and strength that give the artist the vital need of deep expression, undertakes, in this series of paintings, a strenuous and revealing struggle, with yet intense possibilities--even in our times -- of an abstract expressionism that when taken to its last consequences lets us glimpse through and realize that as a formal process it is a medium far from effete.

Iszaevich proposes, with mastery handling of her material means (acrylic on paper, on canvas, collages, etc.) and on large surfaces, an obstinate capability of becoming imbued beyond the canvas surface, and takes us to a realm of subjective tensions and forces that overflow the materic virtuosity scope, so to lead us, abruptly, into the primordial chaos of cosmic structure.

Color explosions of deep analogies show us the wholeness of being in its total reverberant sensation, from an obsessive and sublimated search in painting as a means -- not as an end -- to consent to an order that goes every instance beyond what is purely material to drag us virtually to a transcendent spirituality that reveals man*s conscience as a universal entity.

"Art is given its vitality and effect - said Kandinsky in spring 1912 - not by this or that composition principle or this or that idea of perfection, but a direct expression of feeling, the form that fits the feeling, so spontaneous as a gesture. But as everlasting as a rock."

México D.F., October the 24, 1993