Pictorial work

Fragmentation characterizes our time. We do not believe in totalities: division opens its way, deconstruction precedes the ripping. And if something remains apparently *finished*, it soon suffers substitution by some other element (name it thing, object, feeling, sensation). There are productive aspects with a gleam of splendor without being exempt from a tragic sense based on the ephemeral, the transitory.

In art everything acquires the character of affirmation, assertion, self-dependence and the calling to one self. There, fragmentation rises as a path of plastic search and a definite expression media. It is a piece of reality but it brings to mind that totality exists.

Ofelia Iszaevich works fragmentation in two levels. In the first one, she conveys it in a very personal figurative (Volcano Spitting Poniards and Pain, both from 1992) In the second, the abstract dimension is found in the fragments, (paper, grass or cloth) which intertwine, collide, cross, turn round and round on themselves to translate to spatial tension and sheer movement, the energy that determined the expressive sense, the drawing and the intention of her figurative work.

Heterogeneous fragments combine themselves onto color backgrounds. They flow in a spatial distribution which arises from undoing and building; space does not matter in the beginning of a process. It is a *place* where one searches, finds, denies and affirms, giving origin to a raising space, beginning and end in itself.

Ofelia Iszaevich paints tragic divisions in the plastic path (action painting) that inevitably reminds us of Pollock, because of its dynamism and bodily surrender. Therefore, the magnificent Kigen, Awan and Urgency, among others, are followed by Waiting at the other Bank, big format piece in which reds and ochers are laid across by black strokes with a curved sense. Movement and saturated primary colors stir up a visual cataclysm.

Iszaevich's latest works express her carnal involvement with the emotive-passional making of her oeuvre. There, the pure and trampled movement of somebody who paints with hand, eyes and her whole body, persists. That much she has been able to forebode of her own center.

Elia Espinosa, January 1995