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articles
Radioactive
spring: Sarah de Teliga revisits nature. Tania
Mouraud: Martin Luther King speeches, nails and brass rings, violins, accordions,
and computer generated sounds: an ode to music. Emily
Harvey: a life in
fluxus. Swept
off my feet: Keith Donovan in poetic frame on Jerome
Borel's Paris inspired paintings. America
it seems, is holding vast quantities of Codeine,
Tiger Balm, Tylenol, Preparation H, Chanel No. 5, and Vaseline. Fear
and painting in America: flagging multiculturalism. Jeremy
Stigter's Japanese landscapes: an empire of emptiness. Strange
money: Peggy Preheim
makes a buck. The
lonely contents of a strange world are undeniably ours: Caterina
Verde in Eindhoven. "This
coming together between video, photography and paint involves the environment
and myself. The video footage acts like a paintbrush" says Valentina
Loi. [Warhol
Factory hand] Billy Name once said of Ray Johnson
that he "wasn't a person, he was a collage, a sculpture." Exacting
images of people in the celebrated and banal act
of wearing clothes. Could this be you? James Startt focuses on Uniforms. On
a sun-bleached rooftop a stone’s throw from the Villa Borghese
in Rome, romantic
minimalist Livia
Signorini unfurls
a “quilt” made of Horvath candy wrappers. Painting is either back, or, never left the building.
A discussion around the state of art today. Did
Picabia prefigure our current
human-technology
questions? MADE
IN JAPAN: KILLER CUTENESS INVADES PARIS "What
I do is not really art, not really furniture," chairs
from the throne to the unsitable. Michael
Mandiberg is selling everything. Everything is art, everything is for
sale "...Images
of the Towers being struck and then falling in a plume of smoke." One illusion
of Heaven against other illusions of Heaven.
Fought to the death?" A
letter from Paris, from Basel. Art 32 Basel
reviewed. Swiss
artist thomas hirschorn, in association with
the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Jean-Noel Laszlo: liberty
is still controversial.
Jonathan Horowitz's interactive low- technology web
enabled art show reviewed.
part
1 Art, Paris, porn and the web. part
2
Looks at art and porn in the context of still imagery and film. part
3
asks: is sex in art cultural satisfaction? |
letter
from paris : : matthew
rose
  
radioactive
spring: sarah de teliga
Jetstream
2005
You
might say the Australian artist Sarah de Teliga has brought nature to a new level.
A century and a half after French artists pushed Nature into a closet, this transplant
whose studio in the Montparnasse quarter in Paris overlooks their graves, has
recast those impressions of realism and nature in an electric prism that is unmistakably
hers. Indeed,
a half dozen of the pastels in her solo exhibition at Tim Olsen's Galleries Annex
in Sydney were produced gazing out of her Paris window at the Montparnasse cemetery
(others drawn from parks in Paris, London, Geneva and Avenues in the Australian
countryside). Across this glorious and celebrated city of the dead ˆ many
of them pioneers of 20th century art and literature ˆ bringing to the artist's
mind the Avenues of honor in Australia after the First World War, where each tree
planted was a memorial to a dead soldier (Devotion, 2005), amounting to thousands
of trees planted by grieving communities. In other works, the trees are set blaze
in a hypnotic red, or branches crisscrossing in a startlingly odd neon green or
blue, shimmer in the velvet cake that only pastel can produce. 
The
direct laying on of color that pastel offers, gives this artist - who has shown
her works throughout Europe and Australia for more than 20 years - a means of
rendering light in all aspects of its luminosity (pastel she notes is eminently
mobile). Yet these landscapes are decidedly strange: here is a grid of November
branches with the entrails of a jet careening off into space in a corner of the
sky. Rising out of the red tree in the Montparnasse cemetery is a laser-like beam
of pink and white: an event of nature or man? Many of the backgrounds for de Teliga's
close ups of winter tree bark and branches, spring buds, and autumn leaves have
the distinct characteristic of the supra natural, or something out of Kubrick's
2001 A Space Odyssey. In
Sarah's studio, one sees piles of early 50s and 60s science books, like Exploring
Space and The Story of Our Rocks and Minerals. Here are Technicolor renderings
of rocket ships, launch pads, and capsules pushing off into the darkness, tailed
by streams yellow-orange fire. Or, one finds scientists scavenging in the same
Technicolor glory through grottos for hidden nuggets of emerald and tangerine-colored
gemstones. So it is no wonder that through the prismatic filter of this artist,
her renderings of a cross hatch of branches is an absolute adventure in nature
and in space. There's
something plainly and provocatively radioactive in all her works. Her vision of
nature is one that glows, but is hardly the stuff of fear. Certainly, one could
easily dismiss artists who pass their creative lives in an attempt to depict nature
as a futile effort. But clearly the impulse to do so is powerful. Indeed few pictorial
artworks from any era relinquish the aesthetic frame to exclusively referencing
the man-made. But de Teliga seems to know full scale reproduction of nature is
not as interesting as filtering it and grabbing a piece of nature the way Robert
Motherwell once described his own process of taking a "piece of blue"
for his collage works. Sarah de Teliga does this very thing in the most innocent
and bizarre ways: it's as if she's a little girl, playing under a blue sky who
she reaches up and snatches fragments of the world around her, and lays them out
so they fairly vibrate. So
it's no wonder that the photograph below, taken just outside of Sydney in 2004
of a rock pool, is typical of her aesthetic impulse. She combines the thrill of
action (i.e. the all-over Pollock like embrace of image in the frame) and the
slow distillation of nature through her particular filter of fantasy. Thus, in
viewing these works, there is a kind of hyper awareness of nature, a supra nature,
a future and a past embodied in a single sustained glance. 
The
pure pigment of the medium, she suggests, is her communicative means. It's one
reason why she uses pastels - it's immediacy, the facility, the mind-to hand-to
paper facilitates a directness that is akin to being sunburned, blown by a hurricane,
or well, walking in the rain. The colors are what they are, but they can be changed
and altered…and often are, by her hand (a finger, actually), via palimpsest
and the slight laying of colored dust. Pastel, too, is not too far from colored
rock. sydney
- london - paris "Paris
has very much changed my work since I left London," says de Teliga. "Here
in Montparnasse I look straight out into the copse of trees in the cemetery and
can palpably feel the stillness in this corner of the city. It's a place that
speaks of the city and is well beyond the city - a strange and beautiful place
of life and death." De
Teliga says that the light in Paris is distinct from any other place she's worked,
most recently London. … "Capturing the light in Paris is like running
through fields, but once you begin to study the changes day by day, dusk after
dusk, you can anticipate the specific pink glow that occurs just before the onset
of dusk," she says "It's magnificent. It makes you want to run, and
jump." And
the trees in these spectral dramas, such as "Fast Stick" 2004, she says,
has possibly turned her into an animist. "The trees end up reflecting the
churn of one's mind, or at least enter into that prism that the mind produces
when repeatedly studying nature." Indeed,
there has always been, in this process, an attempt to go from representation to
abstraction using nature as a stepping-stone. Such was the essential basis of
the Impressionists in breaking down light into its elements. In this movement,
nature thus rendered veers off in subjective loops. Details become subjects in
and of themselves, and nature becomes strange, joyous (just look at Van Gogh's
Almond trees in bloom). "For me part of the process is recording both my
pleasure and my curiosity," says de Teliga. "The difference between
our landscapes now and those of 150 years ago are the presence of tiny details
of jet streams and odd lights like lasers flashing through the sky. That's life
on earth these days, isn't it?" 
Fast
Stick 2004
For
more information:
Sarah de Teliga
Tim Olsen Galleries Annex
76 Paddington
Street Paddington NSW 2021
Sydney, Australia www.timolsengallery.com Matthew
Rose is a writer and artist living in Paris, France. E-mail: mistahrose@yahoo.com
affiliates
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