Pictorial work

What do abstract stains have for present day? They are enjoyable. They let us dream. They let us be looking at them. Ofelia Iszaevich pleases us with her rich handling of the material with which she expresses the softness and roughness of movement, where figurative innuendoes are found but not resolved in something concrete. Although there are paintings that appear to have tree branches, foliage, or ground, their plasticity is not dislocated. Their pictorial development seem to rise from the spontaneity of nature. Ofelia Iszaevich*s work shows us strong boldness. It is, at the same time, spontaneous and restrained. She works with a lose precision. Most of her pieces tend to have a color harmony and a balanced composition. In *Winds-confluences*, we see the possibility of a landscape; the background could be a luminous sky, or a field beneath the golden sun. Stains like vegetal logs float on the luminous surface of the painting; the yellow and sienna colors give us a warm chromatic atmosphere. We simply see something close to the essence of the landscape beyond their appearances. The painter squeezes light, color, logic with which she builds her objects, nature. In this way, she creates another reality where her painting hands over the abstraction of the figures of nature, understanding the meaning of the word abstraction firstly*considering the qualities of an object isolated--. Abstract painting chooses the essential from the visible. It is *classical metaphysics* that is self-inclusive.

In some occasions Ofelia Iszaevich uses hard luminous contrasts: yellow or red opposed to black. This can be found in pieces like *Noche de Lobas* (Night of Wolves). The reddish color vibrates enhanced by the contrast of the surrounding darkness. The black color is a heavy lump whose texture makes us feel the density of night and its fauna. This drama of black opposed to light is displayed by the artist in various paintings. We get close to absolute darkness in paintings where the counterpoint is the dark blue color. Ofelia Iszaevich travels from light till darkness following the course of day to the night; in both cases image is shown in color lumps. Texture gives to this color a high load of materiality: paper with its rugosity, cracks of fragments of plants, generating pleats and protuberances.

The thick asphalt lends its presence of antique oil or it is diluted in an opaque veil. Encaustic wax form varied and numerous waves on cloth; even though when the real texture may not be so enhanced, a virtual texture is created with multiple shades of color, playing in numerous variations that happen in the pictorial surface. Even though few paintings do not obtain the depth that others have, these few, definitely, let us see the work of textures, color harmony and the polished work of paper or brush.

In this abstract artist of the end of the century, we find some characteristics which distinguishes her from her ancestors --those from the past which were thought of as being the future--; Ofelia Iszaevich is not ferociously anti-figurative. She lets the figurative evocation come through from its inspiration point to the recognizable visual reality. Ofelia Iszaevich does not establish a pure way to follow a unique course of abstraction, combining abstract expressionism with the materic handling on the surface of the painting. This higher elasticity in the pictorial proposition, the impulse of synthesizing the contributions of the past, place the end-centennial (FINISECULAR) abstraction of authors like Ofelia Iszaevich in the way that other fields of art follow; we are not saying that they fully form part of the current time but they are influenced by it. The practice of this *classical metaphysics* of painting continues to be a practice that enriches, with tinting of academic custody of a truth and with doors to the opportunity of giving fresh versions of what has already been conquered. Anyway, the previous stories should prevent us from treating some artists as the last examples of a species. Abstract art with representatives as Ofelia Iszaevich has a proof of vitality of this pictorial genre in the diversity of nowadays art.