Susie Gadea: The connection, the center and the space of painting
Connection, be the wind, soar to the light is the tour Susie Gadea presents us in this solo exhibit, which we call thus for conventional reasons although it is much more for the author-artist. Planted in the expanse of painting, Susie Gadea shows us a vision of the being. A transformation of primeval memory into visual poetry on canvas.
Decoding abstract symbolism and intrigues of meaning amplifies and attests her intentions: to rescue the center, the being's lost light. To let go and return to the origins. Her own awareness and perceptive framework is revealed as both form and significance. What the artist does not evade is transgression, the need to pour the forces of infinity on the canvas, and particularly on the connecting space of center, light and flight.
For Susie Gadea, space is not simply an element of the painting, but also the point where center and matter seek to add vision and meaning to form. From the pictorial point of view, the painting reveals its topical purpose while pronouncing its superficial and insightful significance.
What is revealed as form-meaning is the logistics of her sensory perception. Susie Gadea´s world is a painting with variations that, as in ancient Chinese art, contains reminiscences of consciousness and sensations of emptiness and plenitude, as Francais Cheng affirms (1993). The single painting is a revelation of itself while at the same time a sequence of paintings unified by their content-expression axis into a unique painting, which is the macroscopic sum of all others.
Thus, the concept of mise in abîme is also a formal and recurring theme in her painting, taking into account the recognizable arquetypical elements assimilated into the superficial and deeper levels of her paintings.
We still ignore why in these pictorial texts Susie Gadea demythifies the very concept of painting. The truth is that through her particular treatment of the elements of visual language, she establishes an innovative dimension of painting based on a single expressive premise.
By absorbing movement and signals in the painting, what is established as a non material body-symbol, becomes simultaneously the antithesis of what is real and its reference. Evidently, this is painting marked by the opposition of matter and memory. It is not that she refuses to promote the models established in painting in the last thirty years, yet from that perspective, what emerges is transgression as meaning and method in art.
The artist's search is not only artistic but also philosophical. Painting is the philosophy of her sense of sight. What extends and is inferred from her work is the levity of pictorial symbols, her personal form, her specific meaning. The artist aspires to the sprouting of the being and the transformation of the myth of painting.
To demonstrate what is concealed behind painting, the artist decomposes the model-form register, thus establishing a visual order based on the symbol, visual imagery and the cosmic axis. From there, Susie Gadea exploration is of figures of visual language, of its system, and essentially of the spirituality of artistic creation.
The relevance of some modern artists that used dematerialization of space as their visual language (Turner, Mondrian, Kline, Stella, De Kooning) arises when visual figuration defines their crisis just as much as substituting the model for simple abstraction. For art of the twentieth century, metacultural detachment from the established emerged from a rupture by post avant garde painters, who elevated the counter-model by renouncing classical standards.
In Europe, as in Latin America and the Caribbean, the 1940´s initiated an anthropological and philosophical shift in art, justified in its episteme as rebellion, debacle or lack of grounding in art. This change in visual paradigms forced new artists to propose novel readings of the visual order and to acknowledge transformations in visual aesthetics.
This frame of thought and artistic creation also produces denial, meta-poetic solutions and an innovative grammar to visual representation.
It is from this perspective that Susie Gadea´s artistic inflection appears, and from it we recognize painting as belief, as origin and as conception of the sphere of life. Her reflection from the act of painting enunciates an inverse abstraction in all her work.
Thus, in “Culmination”, “Giving life to the wind”, “Emanation of the Mind” and “Be all that is”, we find that the dynamic elements of form connect with the indicators and symbols of the aesthetic space, which also intends to be a detailed recollection of thought about the essence of movement and of space itself. (“Beyond good and evil”, “Joy” and “Life in harmony with itself”). The mythical fluency of the paintings mentioned requires seeing it in a special way, as order, meaning and spatial-aesthetic substitution.
Odalis G. Pérez
DACA/IACA
Santo Domingo, 2001
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Odalis G. Pérez is Vicepresident of the Dominican Art Critics Association and member of the International Art Critics Association. Doctor in Philosophy by Carolina University of Prague, Director of the Department of Art Critique and History and member of the Board of Directors of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Universidad Autónoma of Santo Domingo. In 2008 he was awarded the Grand Prize Fradique Lizardo for his literary accomplishments.