A sharp uplifting personal history
A VORACIOUS eye, Reviva Schermbrucker presents a soft, sensual, light and somewhat meditative series of notebook-like paintings and illustrations. The quality of canvas itself is evident, as is the gentle quality of line drawing and, in particular, watercolour paint. One might describe the work as strongly feminine, yet curiously this rather intuitive approach harmonises as a logical set of works that have a strong narrative content.
The raw canvas tends to exude an order and strong backing in itself, yet like the paintings it is ephemeral and drawn in such a way that the various images appear to move. Blotches and splotches, fine design and careful drawing/painting define spaces and places. At the same time, Schermbrucker often resorts to a colour field rectangle that somehow in its wonderful colouration equally defines places and spaces through sentiment, through being present and the appetite to record what is revealed to the eye.
I enjoyed the idea that the immediate fixation to the “painting on the wall” gives way to works beneath works, and the viewer is enjoined to literally page through the works aided by little levers of sorts, thus interacting physically with the art. Thus also there is a literal depth – place is defined from various angles as she weaves a story.
I felt that the experience of paging, then moving to another short notebook around the expanse of the gallery, induced a calming sensation and a joyous surge of energy. She not only records domestic settings but ventures to the street and various other enclaves around the city. A sense of beauty emerges in these studies which are at once documentary accounts, little notes to self as well as light, soft works of art, none asserting its dominance as the top layer of images, if you will, gives way to that which is beneath – and that to that which is beneath, and so on. There is depth, objecthood and an underlying structure until one stops at the wall.
The drawings/paintings are not cluttered, even when there are numerous objects. She often uses words and catch phrases to memorialise or bring to memory a particular space/place.
An emotional quality surfaces as a sure hand, and technique is at play.
The artist describes 28 stories, elements and images, memories and associations that string together and create a personal, and even collective, history.
She calls her work rag books, a seemingly derogatory description, yet by this she means to give a sense of her methods – playing, scribbling, following the will of the line and wither it shall lead – in the artist’s words – “looping and pirouetting”. And it is not just the linear quality that is so impactful, but with paints she allows “blobs and wobbles” to enliven, acquiring impetus by their diet of water.
So much information around us, perhaps to stop and draw what one sees is the antidote to confusion and alienation? One feels the artist’s joy, and surely that is what art is about? Or perhaps, more seriously, this is not necessarily the case, as art history often testifies. For art highlights incongruencies, intellectual uncertainty and institutional hypocrisy, corruption and intolerance. Perhaps art then is precisely a reviling of the aesthetic, the cult of beauty, of art for the sake of art, that rather than resisting a system, simply revels in fantasy or conventional notions (accepted societal standards) of beauty? If that is the case, one could be critical of these works as merely “pretty”. Yet, at this juncture I am torn, for art, too, is about therapy, wholeness of self and the psyche, personal transformation and thence social upliftment – via beautiful form.
Having discerned this contradictory tension, I submit that perhaps the best way beyond this polarity is the acknowledgement of both such aspects – that art is both an escape from reality as well as utterly senseless, even dangerous (consider how visual language, perhaps unconsciously, moves a great mass of people around an idea, commonly referred to as ideology).
Hence the postmodern, post-structural deconstruction of systems and toppling art (read: a corresponding extra-aesthetic ideology) from its pedestal.
Of course, to brand art as “dangerous” is itself the product of a coercive system.
In any event, such considerations aside, Reviva Schermbrucker has produced a body of work both pleasing to the eye and touching enough to uplift the heart.
There will be a free walkabout by the artist at the gallery, 6 Spin Street, on Saturday at 2.30pm.