4 X 4: Four Views, Four Roads
It can’t be easy for an artist who’s achieved critical and commercial success to suddenly change direction. The pressure to repeat past successes must be difficult to resist. Rodolfo Abularach, originally from Guatemala but now living in New York, made his reputation years ago with works treating the human eye as an object of obsessive observation, filled with many meanings. For Abularach, “The eye is the most expressive part of the body…the window of being. It has an internal and external space and contains all possible meanings. It is a world in itself…an object of concentration.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In 1975, Abularach took a risk, abandoning the eye and turning to landscapes, which, I understand, are not naturalistic but imaginative and personal. There are 15 “eye” pieces in this exhibit, all prints: lithographs, etchings, mezzotints, and engravings. It’s clear the artist is a master of drawing and printmaking. He excels particularly in the miniatures, which are only two or three inches square and take their titles from Greek mythology–Achiles, Penelope, and Edipo. Each print shows a single meticulously rendered eye staring out at the viewer.
Whatever Gonzalez Palma’s initial intentions, all collaborations involve compromise, and market success is a form of collaboration that necessarily involves dangerous compromises. Success may seem to offer the freedom of financial independence, but paradoxically it can mean the loss of artistic freedom and ultimately the destruction of personal vision. In an interview with critic Cindy Nemser in 1975, French artist Sonia Delaunay, who was then 89 years old, kept trying to avoid discussing why she hadn’t been granted the recognition she deserved. Delaunay repeatedly said she preferred free thinking and making art very much for herself instead of having a dealer. Finally, on the subject of success, she stated emphatically: “I don’t want it. It’s a false idea you have–an American idea–that artists must be famous. That’s an idea of today….Between me and painting there is nothing.” I sense that the fourth artist in this exhibition, Mirtes Zwierzynski, would agree with this statement. For her, freedom as an artist–both in experimenting with forms and in the choice of subjects–lies outside the marketplace.
The monoprints of “El diario de la guerra” take the form of dated diary entries covering the period of the 1991 gulf war from the first entry on January 22, Nocturne Lament as Landscape, and ending on March 5 with The Last Ones, Everybody’s Requiem. Taken together they form a personal lament for those thousands who died in the presence of those millions whose hearts had turned to stone. In our time, the heart no longer knows how to respond to the mass graves of the unknown dead. Only when the imagination singles out the death of an individual from the hundreds of thousands of casualties is there a possibility of a return to the language of the heart.
