graciela kartofel | Sandrafelzen

With a scientific background, Sandra Felzen completed a Masters degree in Environmental Sciences in New York, where she also took up drawing and painting studies. The Brazilian artist presents her most recent works in Rio de Janeiro. The confluence of science and art is a mainstay of her work. One can argue that the overarching theme of her work is, broadly, nature, but more pointedly, it is landscapes. The observer moves gradually inward: the trees gain greater definition as the wide landscapes recede, forests are painted, or some initial layers; the mist envelopes some of these natural subjects, or with the dawn of a new morning, the sun or a sunset, the painting bursts with color and embraces them. Absent of any human beings, it is these natural beings that inhabit the paintings.

Even if, in most of the works, the trees are primarily trunks, they are presented as groups as in Caminho Digital (2007) or individualized into narrow, vertical windows as in the diptych, Branca II. In this exhibit, the artist develops her visual poetry even further, one that interweaves the languages of drawing and painting. Argentea, Cassia Urbana and Anoitecer offer three different representations of this dynamic between the textural, penciled plot and pictorial representation. Infrequent but to be noted in the second work of the series, an Oriental levity juxtaposed against a hermetic and geometric architecture is introduced, one that is unique in the wider context of the artist’s work.

The images present a series of fluid forces, which converge into positive, romantic works. These consist of notes, insights, memories, ecological warnings, reverential gestures, apparitions, eruptions and geometric games that compete with those from nature. The works take on mixed media in a large scale, inhabited primarily by trunks, trees, bouquets, tree forms in second and third planes, and occasional leaves. Bosque Digital is a work of multiplying trunks which move to a symbolic dance, one that is primitive and ritualistic. Three trunks in the first plane, bound by ringed textures, play in a green meadow with other intermediary, also ring-bound “characters,” joined by a chorus of young treelets.

The artist’s works are not simply paintings of trees. They are delicate studies of trees, nature, earth, the vertical, the primitive, life, the upright being that stands before the absent animal or any other inhabitant of the mountains. The mixed media are rich interplays of drawing and color which inadvertently evoke the geological layers of earth. The composition presents clear diagonals and verticals. Even so, symmetry and asymmetry are alternated with much freedom. The strong verticals are lightened by textural rings that encircle the trunks. The colors are surfaces to profound beings, in their grays and pastels – in all tones, the artist brings a unique luminosity. Sandra Felzen intersperses reds, blues, turquoises, yellows, greens, earth colors and other colors with an elegance of surreal ascendance.

From the perspective of art criticism, there are several questions one must ask in order to adequately consider the works of Sandra Felzen. What is the discernable value of the works’ contents? How does one ponder its author? In comparison with other mixed media paintings of similar theme and/or technique, is there a recognizable personal journey? First, a work of art is not valued for the theme chosen but for the focus or treatment brought forth by the artist. Therefore, the first question has already been answered, as it is clear that Felzen’s work is not a reiteration of the landscape thematic, but rather a rich addition to it. This also answers the second question. The critic notes that through the relationship between the palm, lush and barren trees, Sandra traces a personal journey. One notes a unique interplay between the parts and the whole which testify to the author’s deep kinship with preservation and change: preservation - of nature and the visual arts in their elemental forms, and change - in the way of approaching nature and painting, with respect and re-inventing gazes.

GRACIELA KARTOFEL

New York, June 2009