The Afterworld
Geraldine Gliubislavich
There is in the painting of Géraldine Gliubislavich an immediatelyseductive thread going from the de-piction of desolation through to the consolation of beauty. Again there is also the contradictory rela-tionship between the intimacy of the artist’s singular visions and the universality of the scenes and schools of people put on canvas.
The art of Gliubislavich is buzzing with opposites, caught in the magnetic streams roaming what spreads between all the poles that constitute it. It is important to see that her take on the medium paint relies chiefly on relations. If the paintings are closely related to each others, they also convey the question of the space of painting and of its limits; in this they achieve what one might call a form of conceptual figu-rative art, in so far as the use of a modernist pictorial language is processed reflectively.
These series of pictures are more interrogative then they are exclamatory: they participate in the buil-ding of an open environment in which both the artist and its public can question their own practices. And there lie the riches of this work, in a wealth of ambiguous and fertile interpretations rather than a wealth of clear-cut statements.
There is a definite vagueness to these pictures: not the vague of the trivial, but the vague of the immen-sities. It often seems that what unites the characters and objects on canvas is a matter of life and death, although one entirely devoid of pathos. There is no coincidence or accident here, mysterious laws un-derlie the coherence of this dream-like scenery. The force at play is both undefined and undeniably pre-sent, like the artist’s responsibility or credit in the creation of this ‘Afterworld.’
It is finally a question of distansiation, of the fragile architecture of whatever lies between the work, the medium, the subject, the creator, and the viewer. Or is it in truth a matter of discretion, both in the sense of the freedom with which the artist seems to evolve and of the withdrawn and stern air of these compel-ling pictures?
Nicolas Scheidt © 2007