resurrection through color

daniela name

Ophelia is fire under ice. A dissonant presence in a court hardened by treachery and greedy, she burns of passion for a prince unable to see anything beyond the ghost of his father and his desire of vengeance. A point of light and color motionlessly floating on the frozen lake, the suicidal lady is almost a sister of Estela Sokol’s interventions in the Austrian snow.

        A Morte das Ofélias (The Death of Ophelias), a solo exhibition of the artist at Anita Schwartz’ gallery, is a montage contaminated by a kind of melancholy and mourning similar to that of the kingdom of Denmark. The black pieces in marble, acrylic and PVC form opaque bodies that leave in the space – floor and ceiling – a trail of color. Emerging from surfaces of paint or from acrylic boards leaned on the pieces, hues of orange, pink and yellow permeate the ambiance much like the ghost that frightened Hamlet. They are as well the spectrum of the history of art and painting, an eternal source of anxiety for contemporary art.

        Sokol treats each work, in fact, as if it were a body. By painting or inventing transparent layers for her pieces, she creates guts and membranes for her subtle geometry. The visual lexicon of the artist, with boards folded as breasts, waists or waterfalls, rounds straight angles and disturbs squares in a silent and feminine manner.

        The relation between these works and the space of the gallery is also a delicate one. With its monumental height, the main hall may be tempting to a colossal occupation, with pieces testing in size its maximum degree of potency.The Death of Ophelias does not create a duel with such monumentality or aims to fill it at any cost. There is a delightful unpretentiousness in the exhibition’s setup, which is an almost transference of the artist’s studio to the exhibition hall and takes advantage of the empty spaces. On the white walls and on the empty floor the color found in the black sculptures is able to spread itself, revealing a bit of the soul contained in each body.

        In the small atrium that precedes the great hall, the setup of paintings made of layers of plastic material and photographic enlargement in methacrylate, an apology to accumulation, resumes a dialogue Sokol started some time ago with Malevitch and the Suprematism, especially with the exhibition 0,10(1915), in which the Russian artist displayed his paintings in a radical and apparently disarrayed manner, turning the very setup into a work and a discourse in its own. By installing his Black Square Over White Backgroundin the upper corner of the room, Malevitch granted to abstract art the place destined to religious icons in Russian Orthodox churches. Geometry conquered the space of metaphysics and the symbolic.

        Sokol carries out a similar operation in The Death of Ophelias,with the help not only of the Suprematist inheritance, but also of another reading of the sublime: the romanticism of Shakespeare’s characters, befriend of abysses and mountains, but also of the solitude of a Caspar Friedrich.

        The experience of the artist in the Austrian Alps during the winter was decisive for this result. In order to finish the series Secret forest andPolarlicht, she buried in snow orange and yellow acrylic cubes and planks and hung purple and bright pink latex balls on the trunks of trees. There is also a green taking over the huge white territory with a fluid and imperfect rectangle. Each body of color dies a little in the snow in order to offer it a bit of their nature, thus announcing there the existence of dimensions beyond the palpable level, since each shape is expanded through light.

        Ophelia takes the same direction: by saying farewell to life, she announces the possibility of compassion to the sterile world in which she lives. It’s not necessary to be part of that something rotten in the kingdom of Denmark. By returning to the character, Sokol promotes yet another resurrection: of the legacy of painters like Millais and Delacroix, who also reinvented their Ophelias, and of a whole legion of colorists in the history of painting.

        Being an Austrian like these works in the snow, Franz Weissmann kept in his studio in Ipanema projects of sculpture made of cardboard and paper clips. He had bookshelves filled with these prototypes and argued that each one of them were born with their own predetermined destine. Even if there were never enough material for this, each twisted clip was a dream of a monumental sculpture. The trip to the ice of the Alps reveals this very same vocation for Sokol’s work: the vast space of nature potentializes its evanescent geometry. Like Ophelia, her works are transformed in the snow in order to illuminate the landscape.

        The photos of Austria greatly contributed to the state of melancholy of the exhibition. To enter in a forest is to unveil an extremely metaphorical universe, both for the visual arts and for literature. Ophelia gets lost in the forest before falling from the willow tree and floating on the lake. The brothers Hansel and Gretel enter the thick forest before being a prey to the wicked witch. The couples of A Midsummer’s Nights Dream, another play by Shakespeare, change their fates after spending time with fantastic beings who later hide in trees.

        In Bruegel’s painting The Hunters in the Snow the characters seem to be returning from the forest when they reach the top of the mountain and see the village down below, drawn in the valley. The frozen lakes of this 1565 masterpiece are surfaces of a greenish-blue that rebuild and convey a new meaning to the white vastness of the scene. They seem to be the ancestors of the phosphorescent rectangles and lines with which Sokol painted – and disturbed, in the best sense of the word – the ice desert.

        The forest is a passage, the farewell of a world for the discovery of another. This farewell, like any other, demands mourning and silence. Sokol bestows us with this necessary and reverent pause, so that we can perceive the intensity of color blazing the ice, reverberating in the whiteness as an annunciation of life after death.