Pictorial work - 2006 - 2007

Ofelia Iszaevich, painter, draftswoman and maker of untold poetic and aesthetic textures, is a multifaceted creator. This diversity may seem strange today, when professions and activities tend to specialization. Nevertheless, in the case of Iszaevich it answers to the idea of Art as an expressive need; Art is a way of seeing and being with the world; in other words, for Iszaevich,Art and Culture are a way, or better said, the way to live life: the aesthetic adventure taken to its limits.

It is difficult enough to attain a synthetic reading of the artist’s complex itinerary. Nevertheless, at first approach one finds two important moments in her trajectory. In the first stage, from her beginnings until the end of the 80’s, she identifies with the tradition of art as structure, both if one regards her first figurative pieces, or her 80’s and 90’s collages. In this tradition, we find Cézanne, Torres García, Noucentisme and Cubism. These artists, as Iszaevich, used to search for an ideal form, an ideal of harmony. This is the key: Image as ideality. These painters are not so interested in reproducing the world of appearances as in articulating a sense of order. And in cases when they are interested in Nature, it is observed as something that needs to be “structured” or corrected – by sensitivity– to attain that ideal shape hidden under what is visible. The art of structure means to order, or better, to transform into rules –of composition, architecture, etc.– the shapeless face of Nature. And thus, an ideality or essence is sought, a depuration of the anecdotic. The tradition we refer to is the classical tradition that represents an Art conception which was present underground during the 20th century, regardless of the classification of traditional styles.

The second moment mentioned is situated by the mid 2000’s, when Iszaevich presents values that, *a priori* might seem contradictory with the principle of structure: dissolution of form, perhaps as a consequence of the impact and influence of European informalists, and of course, of the great matter masters , particularly Josep Guinovart, Antoni Tàpies, Frederic Amat, Manolo Millares and Burri. If Art as structure meant a very pronounced notion of form, architecture, geometry, compositional laws, etc., now, Ofelia Iszaevich introduces a *non finito *or “unfinished” register. Indeed, the coalescence of new values such as textures, loneliness, the “intimist landscape”, the notion of void and fragmentation, among many other aspects, lead to this dematerialized or vaporized painting, greatly lyrical and fragile, which is a mature language full of poetry. The artist has not renounced to the notion of structure that was obtained through a totally abstract language, but rather has articulated a synthesis between structure and all other values of “non permanence” and dematerialization, with all their implicit connotations. The recent work of our artist keeps proposing the quest for an ideal or essential form, but now with a balance between structure and its dissolution.

Formal unity, for the artist returns to her already traditional earth tonalities, blacks and whites, renouncing to those outbreaks of color that she allowed in past years, now working again with a significant materic relief. A rotundity without fissures that is not discordant with an impression of fragility (the materials in use seem at times on the verge of crumbling), overwhelms, who understands that Tàpies moves on the ground of certainties and needs. Unity of argument for its insistence in a visionary and ancestral conception of the human being: men and women made of clay, earth, stone; “interred” characters as those we see in *Tierra* and *Escritos blancos*, an almost formless creature that contorts itself and argues immersed in its building matter of adobe, clay and straw, while its state is defined by the words “Inter esser”.

To be earth, namely, to be of the same substance of the world that sustains us, supposes the idea of Nature animated with a soul. Mountains that inspire and lakes that expire, as those in one of the most accomplished pieces of the exhibition, in which a lonely note of color is inserted, the papers used in collage interplay. It is suggested to be underground, back in the motherly bosom, to sprout and grow. The pottery gods come to mind, the cavities produced by the bodies overlaid by lava and ashes of Pompeii and Herculaneum, the animist beliefs… “Dust you are and into dust you shall become”…the dreadful and profound sentence uttered on Ash Wednesdays…

Yet what is the deep meaning of her work? In some conversations, the artist references an essential reality; she speaks of emotion, feeling and thought; she points out that the painter’s gaze has to see “what is luminous, mysterious, strange, surprising, deep, tragic, immense, near, vibrant, transparent, untouchable, indefinable…” But, attention!, expressive strength and poetry derives from language; emotion becomes concrete through language, Art is limited and contained in language; emotion is realized in language, which is the limit and condition of Art.

Two of the 20th century most admired artists: Rothko and Tàpies are expressions of the sacred and the absolute: they are not constrained, but a mystical or religious experience. Tàpies, Rothko, Amat and Guinovart stand for an Art of the profound, an Art of the transcendent, a search for the great mystery. In their trajectory is a clue: Art as knowledge, or at least the intent of approximation to what is concealed or secret of life, that which comes along, -according to them- with an ethical principle. This I think is the motivation of Iszaevich as an artist all along her trajectory.

By all accounts, I believe that Ofelia Iszaevich does not deny the “influence” of those artists, on the contrary: she shouts her tragedy, her history wrapped in a past and a present that hold her alive, expressing it all through painting. Two previous examples were the exhibitions that she presented in Mexico City; the first, in 2000, *Rituales de* *Tierra* (Earth Rituals) shown at the Academia de San Carlos, and *Más* *allá de la Superficie* (Beyond the Surface) at Casa del Lago in 1993, where she marked the difference with many of the artists of her generation, that is, Ofelia is distinguished by remaining creatively young. It is useless to appraise her actual production by recurrent references to what she was: we can face her always in the present. And that is so, not because of practicing continuous change, but by the intensity and power of her works, due not only her indisputable know-how, but from the intimate connection between her interiorized intuitions of reality and their plastic concretion. What happens afterwards? It is difficult to say. The work of Iszaevich evolves in time. To some wall she adds figurative elements, hermetic elements, the game and discovery of handmade paper… The artist researches new registries, the world of the object, new topics and materials, like resins… Lastly, let us say that her work gains in ambiguity and richness.

In the end, the mystery, the emotion of Art and poetry are contained in Ofelia’s language, as a result of the combination and articulation of plastic or linguistic elements. All along her trajectory – spanning more than forty years– there is an exploration of the obscure, of the hidden… Moreover, as the alchemists, Ofelia Iszaevich transcends matter. We wish her to succeed…