‘Goodbye, Lover’ Project
La Petite Mort Gallery presents
NATALIE BRUVELS, Goodbye, Lover
September 12 – 18, 2014 / Vernissage Friday September 12 / 7 – 10pm
Artist Quote:
‘This series of paintings emerged after a 12-year relationship came to an end this past winter. They are in fact paintings atop of paintings. Hers atop of his.
The act perhaps easily viewed as a vitriolic desecration is what bad endings threaten to do to the precious cities of the interior after over a decade of construction’. – Natalie Bruvels, 2014
Statement:
In her new series titled Goodbye, Lover Natalie Bruvels proposes the idea that a work of art is never simply that of its present manifestation. Here, those painted surfaces that hold visual authority, and thus direct the course our immediate aesthetic judgments carry both the material and emotional weight of the unknowable precessions that lie beneath. Bruvels’ works implicate that there are always pasts at work that radically inform, even instruct, the organization of visual space.
The Goodbye, lover paintings offer re-orientations of ‘finished’ works produced by the artist’s now former long-term partner. To tug in the opposite direction of the extreme vengeance of effectively destroying someone’s art, Bruvels paints intimate and sexual moments of closeness. Upon learning that these paintings have been painted over, we lose ourselves as along the imagined impetus of both the initial work and Bruvels’ continued gesture. Where does the ‘base’ end and ‘surface’ begin? These questions are not simply restricted to the aesthetic realm but intersect along other deeply personal motivations.
Other conventional binaries begin to dissolve: passion and terror, intimacy and distance, creation and destruction, means and ends. As is true of her previous work, Bruvels’ intricate layering of visual information cannot be taken for granted – meaning is never simply ‘there’ but is rather always implicated along a prolonged search. By her rhetorical wit and overall command of the brush, we are positioned in an uneasy, yet seemingly pleasurable space in which points along the visual field are resolved only in tension. As soon as one form is thought to have been acknowledged, so too do others shift accordingly.
In this series, fragmentation is pushed to a particular ideological extreme – it operates not only as a detached visual finality, but also along the deeply felt relations of bodies to objects: in process. And thus even in the arrested visual space of the painting, forms are not sedentary but always already moving as fleeting transitions to the broken memory of a future already passed. Presence – by the visual field, the artist’s hand, and of ourselves as viewers – is tightly held in a paradoxical becoming of which the material object itself stands at the center.
The duality of the force and fragility of the brushwork is perceptually evident in each of the works. Bright, immediate colours are flushed against this threshold of visuality. Still, Bruvels’ paintings subvert the art historical, masculinist tradition of the authoritative brush stroke that somehow ‘emerges’ from the booming potentiality of the space of the canvas. These works operate in a radically different conceptual realm where meaning is always already inherited. Personal and artistic growth, then, could be read along a willingness to acquiesce and play in ambiguity and to map angst onto a new (old) context. Here, personal and projected histories expand from within material.
The precise mathematical symmetry of ‘balance’ is perhaps a lie we tell ourselves. It seems too romantic. In these works, amalgamations of memories are lodged into visual field along subtle yet forceful resistances that extend first within the seams of the canvases. Tension becomes a kind of resolve in its own right.
Here, we arrive at the understanding that there is never such a thing as a ‘blank’ canvas: Bruvels’ works show us that no matter the impulse or outcome, you cannot have a vengeful painting on top of a vengeful painting.
– Written by Adam Barbu, 2014