Flying, in peace, to the essence...
Art employs matter to stimulate the spirit. In his book “On beauty and its form” Hegel examined art history and established three mayor periods that are nothing more than three periods of spiritual development, or better still, three levels of ‘self awareness’. He seemed to pursue the concept –coined by him and later validated by material dialectics– of “consciousness of self and for self”.
In this way, the spirit reached the highest level of development, leaving behind the burden of classical and ancient art, to express itself as the essence of the soul, erasing from its intangible body all the material traces that could determine its meaning: because no concrete form can express, contain or reflect the spirit, without ultimately limiting it. According to his scheme, ‘romantic art’ was the beginning of this spectacular liberation.
If this is so, this famed philosopher had anticipated abstract art, with its defining traits and characteristics. Vasily Kandinski´s symbolic, non-metaphorical efforts, with his great morpho-chromatic blocks of ‘resonance’ –the exchange of morpho-chromatic value for meaning– were the ABC of his inicial visual ‘reality’ assumed as object of the subject.
It is no coincidence then, that in the search for levels of meaning that would create a ‘resonance’ –that relates to visual reality, morphology and sound with feeling– art would unfold new perceptions of absolute experiences that enable a direct dialogue with the soul.
At this point, thought became tangible through art. The image no longer existed nor expressed emotion. Emotion was art, flowing directly on and through art, returning to the soul, its origin and destiny.
Almost a century later, the images of art return to this island of clear, blessed skies, with Susie Gadea´s exhibit. From Suro in 1949 to Peña Defilló in 1963, Dominican abstraction was born with an inclination for the horrendous. It formed over the mass of distress and darkness of a country at war and deprived of its freedom. It explored the soul facing the cosmic reality of the space era, then opening in front of us, to build out of emotion the direct or indirect visual references of a whole new reality of black holes and astrophysical phenomena, assumed as suggestions of what Carl G. Jung refered to as ‘correspondence’ and ‘premonitions’. Or it materialized the heroism of nature.
It is in this sense that Susie Gadea´s images are enriching. Exploration, expression and experience of correspondence between images and a feeling of spiritual wholeness, of ultimate freedom and etherealization under the mantle of the symbol of flight. Everything related to that intangible certainty is expressed in a technique cautious of redundancy and repetition. Painting of suggestions, colors of murmured sounds, images of a reality condensed in an elegant chromatic scheme that evades all loudness and totality, yet contains an impressive diversity of tones and hues in its silent existence.
The spirit adopts attributes related to birds, elevating itself above the material to build a tranquil and melodious space of impressively simple metaphors, with an intriguing and inspiring cleanliness and stylistic coherence. The feeling of sublimity, fulfillment, openness, freedom and the ecstasy of serenely flying over life are expressed in these images, and is printed on our souls…
Ignacio Nova
DACA/IACA
Santo Domingo, 2001
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Ignacio Nova is member of the Dominican Art Critics Association and of the Internacional Art Critics Association, he is a cultural consultant and Director of Contemporanía.