Without Shelter and Without Law*
This is not just any exhibition by Karina Peisajovich. No one who knows the course of her work, and the degree of mastery she has achieved over the last fifteen years, can have expected this willingness of hers to submit to the unknown. Who, after all, risks their hard-won know-how, their merit, automatic approval, or comfort in this way?
Unlike what she's done in past series and projects, in which from various angles she explored the ways in which light creates image, Karina Peisajovich this time hasn't kept to any central conceptual-visual core. This time what she's set out to do is make pictures with the idea-sensations that had been appearing to her over some months, without being too concerned about the heterogeneity of what they might lead to, or whether it would be possible to shape all the ensuing disparateness into a whole. One day she painted a portrait of her cat Marcel; on another day, she recreated the memory of a recent visit to the Burle Marx Site, in Rio de Janeiro. One day she built up three layers of pure chromatic sensibility; and another day, she condensed melancholy and uncertainty into a cloud-stone-brain, as terrifying in its way as that dog in Goya that's drowning in the sand.
To wonder, then, about the common denominator of these works may seem a bad idea; but no, it's not. There is a device that has remained structurally unaltered since the Quattrocento, namely, the picture, a material base, which is oil on canvas, and an organizing axis that precedes the concept and visuality; and it remains the emotional and creative arrangement that leads to the painting-event. The painting of Marcel or the Burle Marx Site, directly linked with this arrangement, because the look, the tone, the form of being of a cat with which one shares one's life may suddenly, on any given day, reveal a mysterious distance and difference vis-à-vis oneself, as may an instant of wandering through the Brazilian landscape architect's nursery gardens open up an unexpected channel of contact with one's own activity and production; and it's in those unique moments that something happens. The focus is placed on what erupts, on the micro-explosion, and on what will be unleashed starting from that point: creation as a forth-and-back circuit between artist and painting, a process and a two-sided transformation, a co-creating.
Between a willingness to paint without knowing what will emerge and the growing awareness of an affection that came to her in the days in which she was painting, there lies: a capacity for self-analysis, porousness, audacity, and a flair for choosing what out of the existing wealth of technical, conceptual, and art-historical knowledge may contribute to the renewed challenge of painting. As in this small geometric painting in which she uses resources from concrete art and other anti-figurative avant-gardes in order to make us feel the freedom and the play that can exist in a class of objects which, in order to be conceived, required an anti-tradition of rupture and combat. This oil by Karina Peisajovich contributes, to the field of post-concrete images, detours, deviations such as texture, modulation (and what it has of warmth, of volumetric effect, of internal shadow, which is a trace of corporeality), and an irregular plane that follows over the four edges of the canvas and comes up to where the fold defines a material limit internal to the picture.
The unity of the whole is determined, then, mainly by the process. And although it was neither a goal nor a condition, the result was a group of paintings compositionally, iconographically, and conceptually strangers to one another. From this we deduce that the procedural character, to some degree random, hence unexpected, a matter of chance, is inherent to the image we see. So that the portrait of Marcel isn't simply that of a beloved cat who appears because Karina Peisajovich prepared herself to be free enough for it to emerge, and this adventitiousness, as subtle as it appears, remains in the image. And it does so because it structures it.
Even for master artists it's hard to confront a challenge like the one Karina Peisajovich has set for herself. The leap from one genre to another, from figuration to non-figuration, from the spectrum of grays to the full-scale palette, from artisanal composition, detail by detail, down to the stain and the abstract, requires more tempering and flexibility than would producing a certain number of variations on the same motif or idea. These decisions underscore the unity of the whole. So much so, that one would have to call a "work" not each piece taken separately, but the whole that they form almost without one's noticing it.
Santiago García Navarro
Writer
*The title of the exhibition has been taken from the film Sans toit ni loi (1985), written and directed by Agnès Varda.