Atrapados en lo desconocido

It’s necessary to see beyond appearances. This statement is the first thing to detach itself when in contact with the work of the artist Christiane Pooley, whose paintings reveal fragments of a personal universe, made up of images and elements from daily life. Using photographs, collages, reflecting surfaces and diverse materials, she seeks to create an autonomous space in which the works themselves speak and relate to one another through a series of symbols and correspondences.

In this constructed universe, almost alive, we find characters that wander around without a fix course, invented firmaments, and horizons that threaten to disappear. It is not only on the canvas that these manipulations occur but also in the artist's studio. She directs her own theatrical and visual scene and allows us to be a part of the intimacy of the staging itself, behind the scenes, where the characters are revealed to us, in all their fragility, almost as puppets at the mercy of an invisible hand.

Sometimes, we see that it is herself who is represented in her paintings, structuring and dominating her own game. It is through this game where, as well as using it as a vehicle to show us her vision, Christiane Pooley reminds us of the materials with which she is working. She is interested in questioning the painting methods and faces each work as a different challenge. The spaces left without paint discover parts of the support, the fast and spontaneous gestures represent a place or character in a direct manner and, at the same time, through a calculated synthesis it suggests a world lacking spatial truths, defying the rules of perspective established in the post-renaissance landscape.

She paints directly on the white canvas, without hesitation, what matters isn’t detail perfection, but to understand the act of painting as a way of thinking, where the unity accomplished by the theme and the own canvas as a material object can converge. In this process also emerge her references, from Peter Doig to Wilhelm Sasnal or Luc Tuymans but without ever betraying, from their influence, the unique vision of the artist.

By looking beyond the actual subject, the observant viewer will see that in each one of these images, what is being revealed to us,as the centrepieceis the paint itself. Thus, one can understand Christiane Pooley ́sprofound visual and conceptual connection with regard to the problems of representation and the conflicts that emerge when manipulating a fluid material on a flat surface. The colour and the texture of the support combined with the agility of her wrist, that allow to give up and abandon oneself in the contemplation of the image created by the artist ́s hand.

She says that what interests her is “the duality that painting possesses, because it is simultaneously a physical object and a visual image, and to experiment with the idea that painting is destined to remain in a state of limbo, trapped in the fine limit between being an illusion and being areal and tangible object”. This intimate and personal way of facing the pictorial creation, precisely

explains the way the artist chooses to reveal it to the spectator. Each work of art presents a challenge for her to question art and illusion, and also perception and reality.

It is interesting to re-read the conceptual definition of Cubism as given by Picasso in an interview with Marius de Zayas in 1923:  « Cubism, he revealed, is no different than any other school of painting. The same principles and the same elements are common to all of them. Cubism comprehends and uses drawing, composition and color in the same spirit and in the same way as all the other schools. Our subject matter is perhaps different, for we have introduced objects and forms previously unused in painting. We have kept our eyes – and minds — open to our surroundings. We give both color and form all their individual signification, as far as we can see it; in our subject matter, we retain the joy of discovery, the pleasure of the unexpected: the subject itself must be a source of interest. »

Barely four years later, Marcel Duchamp, in a speech given at the New York Museum of modern Art in 1961, on the occasion of the Art of assemblage exhibition, in turn reassessed the use of the object as a pictorial form through his own use of ready-mades. With this incontestable argument « As all the tubes of paint used by artists are manufactured and ready-made products, we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are assisted ready-mades and works of assemblage ». Thus, with its wilfully absurd humour, the ready-made validates the use of the object, or its drawn representation, in the eyes of the artist. From “Nude descending a staircase” up until “Etant donnés 1946-66” conserved in the Philadelphia museum, his objects were to cast a brilliant and benevolent shadow over the generations of artists who followed. The question is not one of professing affiliation to or scepticism of the Duchampian school of thought; but recognizing the facts as they are in rhizomes – like a river branches out in a delta – in aesthetic schools, with chosen camps, however brief or divided these might be post-War. Far from putting an end to the artistic thought-process, Duchamp’s art of assemblage hence remains within the so-called « limits and limitations of painting » of the cubism of Picasso.

The art historian is often reminded that the world of ideas is but an eternal recommencement of a desire to break away. And I do not believe that the world of ideas presented in this exhibition by Christiane Pooley in any way belie her engagement in her own time. At the age of twenty-seven, after exhibitions in Paris and in Europe, she above all engages in a form of conciliation: if her paintings on the surface like to bring often intriguing stories to seed, through subjects here and there that seem to be posed and placed by the invisible hand of a puppeteer, or seem almost directed in the manner of a film-maker fond of Godard and Persian miniatures (indeed!), her paintings also like to show the strings: she takes pleasure in interrogating painting methods and constructing a space that is made up of the relationships between perspectives, of distant links between the subjects, of a very particular play between the glances exchanged – or absent, situating so much silence between the landscape and the action and the motivation of the actions. « I like, she says, to show as much the physical and temporal aspects of the painting as I do revealing it as an object. The painting is for me as much a physical place as an imaged one, between illusion and again offering its real and tangible nature ».