work

Nothing threatens me,

not even the sun.

The sky is an immense cloud

made of mother-of-pearl.

The lake is an immense cloud

made of mother-of-pearl.

I am the mermaid of the lake.

— I am an infinite melody

like the murmur of the rain.

(From “Purity” by Nina Cassian)

Far Bright Star, a show of uncanny range, touching on philosophy, aesthetics and even love while remaining fully alive to the abstract potential of its theme, it's nonetheless strictly concerned with visibility. As any act of making the eye and the mind aware of the infinite universes created by the hands of artists through time, the show also embeds its stance. At once both curious and reverential, at the level of the how the old masters’ paintings were made, and in turn perceived, especially today.

This investigation of baroque, impressionist and surrealist works represents a focused cross-section of the show’s aim at understanding the ways in which art history has been created, both through the art works that enter its canon, and the contexts—discursive and personal—that shape it. Far Bright Star addresses art history as a starting motif for a conversation on the specific aspects of contemporary art’s relation with its past. While defining the first through a system of influences that it encapsulated, this exhibition aims to identify the sources and the elements of such power in one contemporary artist’s work.

Stretched to its breaking point while being at once materialized and dissolved into art, the notion of ‘star’ assumes a plastic quality in this exhibition, entering into a much more poetical space of purpose, while nevertheless seeking to foster a productive, if at times, material reverie.

Thus, the exhibition structure could be said to refer to a universal situation, one that speaks about collecting and mapping the interrelations that produce inside a collection. A broader context, just as our rear view over the history of art where the most definitive characteristic of which is the experience of being immersed, utterly, in a world marked by an unprecedented diversity and depth of difference.

In art history, just as in astronomy where astronomers can determine the mass, age, and many other properties of a star by observing its motion through space, luminosity, and spectrum respectively, the artist’s body of work and its practice can be understood, classified and in the end put in a relationship with other nearer or farther artists.

The star metaphor thus becomes a vehicle for the allure of spatial exploration as well as for time and memory. There’s something at once incredibly empowering and incredibly humbling in knowing that an artwork that we're seeing today has sparked the memory of another one, one with which it doesn't have a concrete connection, but rather a sensorial or emotional intersection.

The voice of the enigmatic work of Iris Schomaker that opens the show is revelatory for the whole exhibition journey. It’s dripping portrait guides the rest of the show’s palindromic structure and closes in a murmur the entire display. Based in the model of Goethe's writing about the sky as much as on the logics of daydream, the exhibition starts a cinematic journey on Salvador Dali’s hallucinatory reality, a trip in a lucid literary fiction designed by Toulouse Lautrec, and a disturbing ‘orthodox’ battle vibrating from within Goya’s piece. In the middle of it all, as a constant reminder of the reason for which this traveling had begun, stand the works of Iris Schomaker.

Executed in a different technique, Iris Schomaker’s paintings rise with the same weightless attitude as of its smaller scale company of lithographs. They share the same monochromatic and expressive quietness as the graphic works in any conventional sense, while also revealing the presence of the artist’s hand. The flatness of their surface catches the light at various angles and eases the otherwise geometrical effect. Her drawing lines, sometimes exact, other times in a continuous search-like movement, are speaking about Iris’s luminous handling of paint. Be it soft, translucent or chalky thick, her painted volumes seem immaterial, but at the same time visible through her use of light and shadowy depths. Like glowing after-images, or mirages conjured out of nothing, her bodies seem to float in a space where there is no gravity and the time had stopped.

Iris’s works move beyond the conventional narrative structures that tend to construct coherent temporal structures in order to configure time. There is a suspended state of time that exists in her paintings and individual moments liberate themselves from the continuity of movement and extricate themselves from historical time. The body in her paintings used to be confined in space and now it is time that imprisons it. Because in her work, space becomes a metaphor only, one of everything which is left aside, forgotten, or even damned—a metaphor of that quiet, almost inaccessible place of Mystery.

In some of her compositions, multiple perspectival planes collide breaking the illusion of a single homogeneous, unchanging space. This multiplicity of perspectives breaks the single static position of the viewer and is woven into the visual construction. A structure that draws its beauty from its own elusiveness. 

This congruent setting in a neutral space and time frame of the entire exhibition highlights the kinds of dialectics that are obtained from these juxtapositions between contemporary art and old works dating from the 19th to the 20th century. The individual ones belonging to the artists themselves, but also, by extension, to the viewer, who encounters the works at different historical moments, and contexts, including in that the ones created for them by this show.

When we look at Iris’s works, with her majestic compositions, delicate nuances and inks, and distinctive brush strokes, we are reminded of not only the masters of past centuries, but also of the glories of grand opera with its magnificent performances. An opera like the Japanese Noh which stresses the simplicity of gestures while leaving the main characters performing poetic solo recitals.

Although painting and music have complex afterlives, circulating via shifting paths of exchange, the virtuosity that holds these great works forever in place is always a transcending vector.

It is difficult to talk about an artist’s individual brushstroke because it’s hard to explain the difference between an utterly casual stroke, flawlessly executed, a mark of perfect control and a line made in imitation of an old master’s hand which after a thorough look, you discover as being crude or flashy. That is why an artist’s technique may be compared to the voice of a singer. The voice, a gift itself bestowed by nature, requires training, but its timbre, range and tonal color are uniquely its own.

With an eye toward excavating the hidden histories that lay in the grounds of such artistic mastery, Far Bright Star explores which attitudes and practices of past centuries are preserved and which of their visions continue to be present and alive. Through it all, Far Bright Star speaks about time as a frame to think-through, and about art as a continuous life event that links the past to the future.

The grandeur and serenity of Iris’s work with its peculiar fusion of levity and shapely definition renders her and the other’s poetry existentially assuring.

Denise Jambore