Painting is today incessantly disparaged in its selfreflective pretensions, glimpsable in the discussion of its means and the conditions of possibility in the contemporary situation, under pressure from the omnipresent ideology of communication which induces a belief in a cultural sphere always a priori to the work of art, which for this reason has the power to define its criteria and even demand from it the efficiency is expected from an act of communication
To arrive at a final version of the historical reasons for this discredit, it is worth asking if the cultural criticism accumulated over the last decades – in the rush to condemn formalism in which we witness the draining of the modern tradition – would not have condemned, in the same stroke, the core of productivity in artistic thinking, precisely its material dimension, which guaranteed it the prerogative of placing itself under scrutiny, along with the conditions under which the cultural debate of its time is formulated. Since, as we know, such a condemnation would fall back upon the historical and social dematerializing of art that formalist idealism carried out, it is surprising that now it would annihilate precisely this material dimension – linguistic – through which art can appear even on the inside of the same social process.
On the other hand, it is as if the context of contemporary art functioned to obtain a fit with no remnants between the need for works of art to reach the public forum and the cultural and institutional expectations which surround it, leaving in the end, little room for conceptual hesitations. It is clear that such a state of things, in inscribing the reception of art as a positive act of communication, of the dissemination of an average cultural pattern, conspires against the possibility of the existence of the intransitive, of the reflective hiatus that can only come to express itself if the contemporary debate were to be capable of reviving – surely it would only be worth doing in new terms – the notion of form. If it were capable, finally, of precipitating a discussion which puts back on the agenda the modes by which it remains latent in contemporary artistic
problems, even while discredited, “deconstructed” or cited through the filter of styles. It is this universe of questions which interests the painter Marina Saleme.
In any case, it is a difficult and onerous position for any painter to assume today. Even wishing to reinstate the question of form on the agenda, it is necessary to admit that painting that which inclines toward metalinguistic doubt and places profoundly in check the material circumstances of production (which signifies the means, the formal procedures, as well as the materiality of its social circumstance) cannot be exempt from the fact that the public dimension of contemporary production is more and more confused with the cultural sphere marked from point to point by heterogeneous extra-artistic exigencies.
Summing up, it might be said that the diffuse sphere of culture robbed art of the privilege of operating the field of vision as the highest perceptual experience, once the more or less arbitrary exogenous factors converged already metabolized, such as “culture” or “visual culture” in innumerable other instances, such that it would no longer be possible to affirm that the constitution of the field of vision occurs under the strict jurisdiction of a perceptual phenomenon and while a perfect relationship and with no rough edges between subject/object is maintained.
What to paint? At what vantage point should the painter position him/herself? What is a possible contemporary attitude in the presence of painting? Will there be inner regions that the field of vision, as it is conceived in modern art, hasn’t already touched? One of the fundamental questions that one asks then of Marina Saleme’s work is about this heterogeneous object that now comes to occupy the “see” of the painting. Nevertheless, her central problem will always be precisely to go beyond the reigning cultural pedagogy, not because she finds herself tormented by the interrogation into the authentic or of the supposed originating nucleus of painting, but rather to construct an initial condition for work, where the constituting force of the vision will have to clear the way of forms that have already be culturally colonized.
To clarify right from the start that what is at issue is possible “content” of painting (that which it treats), the work deliberately acts out an indefiniteness between the abstract register and the figurative2, such that the observer always has the impression of looking at something vaguely identifiable, “outside” at an “external” object. The half defined image is there, in sum, to set up the wedges for the field of representation.
But what do these paintings represent? Nothing if not the sum of the attempts to adjust themselves to a frame for vision, bringing to the forefront the signs of a formal “skeleton,” which works to fix some object, to put the neutral and undifferentiated surfaces which comprise the contemporary landscape into space(and particularize them), regardless of how fluidly and fragmentarily it can be imposed on such a landscape.In any case, it is evident that it would be decidedly inappropriate to consider these canvasses “abstracts,” if we conceive of the term as a successive process of reduction culminating in the synthesis of the inner forms. On the contrary, what counts here is mainly the outside and the materialism of vision affirmed in each canvas. Finally, it is necessary to underscore that the question for the artist would not be the reduction, but the constitution of the forms.
Given that the body of the work makes no claim as “conceptual painting,” is devoid of the slightest intellectualist toward or pretension at theorizing, it clearly operates with a margin of reasonable indetermination, between the intellectual desire to constructively organize vision in an entropic environment and letting oneself be carried away by tactile sensations that place it in space, localize it and incorporate the position of the observer in an integral way. With this, the paintings emphatically reintroduce with no ostentation of intellectual ingenuity the hedonistic and sensitive qualities of the eye, without simultaneously ignoring the demands of the conceptual and self reflective operation in process.
This is concentrated, despite appearances, in a restricted list of formal procedures.In fact at first lends the impression of being the starting point is an arduously achieved product. Thus, for example, the informal
appearance, bordering on the gestural, of many of these works, as well as their feebly signed networked structures are in truth the visible face of an obstinate constructive organization of the field. In this same way colours that would suggest the expansion of an expressive anxiety, arise somewhat arbitrarily from the possible variability of pigments at hand. In this sense, there will always be a contrast between the minimalist divestiture of procedures and the expressive result obtained, indicating, when all is said and done, an engaged and highly singularized apprehension of their “external object.”
It is worth nothing that at the same time that the works call for the instruments of constructive language, and through them, the discriminatory and totalizing capacity of vision, the irrecusable injunction of the elements of indetermination in this field is recognized. Such elements are part of the ideological layer which the cultural experience ceaselessly produces and it is up to the eye to reprocess them, to suspend the moral that they imply, under penalty of seeing it own constitutive experience undermined.
For this reason, one can affirm from the start that Marina Saleme’s paintings begin in doubt with relation to the credibility of their subject, doubt regarding their vocation for redescribing a contemporary “landscape.” The fact that they are involved with the modes of persistence of problems of form does not mean then that are not vulnerable to such indetermination, since it is precisely this vulnerability which ends up limiting the control of the constructive language and invites a particularization, a case by case consideration of each visual circumstance.
Thus the focus that the works struggle to accommodate allows for a certain drift, hovering around, but never fixing on a center of the imaginary and although the frontal aspect is constant, it does not exclude some fluctuation in perspective. These are variables to keep in mind and there the singularity of the observer intervenes, testing the efficiency of his/her ray of vision in a field saturated with cultural proselytism, but whose coordinates she can, in the end, determine.
translated by Ann Puntch.