/eE.l.os/
or
Threads, a creative partnership between Bay Area painters
Andreina Davila and Ytaelena Lopez
/eE.l/os/ highlights the
potential harmony existing between the environment and human beings. Our goal
is to incorporate the Greek concept of Kalos
Kagathos, or beauty with purpose. The possibility of two artists working
together toward an unforeseen yet beautiful outcome inspires hope and maybe
encourages others to explore themselves and their connection with the world
around them. /eE.l.os/ aims to connect and at the same time blur the lines
between the work of the two artists. One plus one equals many.—Andreina Davila
and Ytaelena Lopez
We in the art world are accustomed to consider artmaking
primarily a solitary activity, and artwork as reflecting a single sensibility. In
general, that is the case, so we normally scant the idea of artistic collaborations.
In the Renaissance, painters learned their craft in workshops headed by master
artists. Remember, for example, Andrea del Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ (1470-5 or so), with its radiant angel, the
contribution of a young Leonardo da Vinci. The creative marriage —or
mountain-climbing expedition, depending on which metaphor you find more
striking—of Picasso and Georges Braque during the early years of Analytic
Cubism is another creative collaboration, producing paintings that, although
painted separately, were indistinguishable even to their creators. Picasso also
maintained a serious rivalry with Matisse, each painter challenging the
other—as Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael had, five centuries earlier:
collaboration as parallel evolution.
The Venezuelan painters Andreina Davila and Ytaelena
Lopez, who met in the Bay Area, entered, in February, 2015, into an artistic
partnership, entitled /eE.l.os/. The word, a typographical variation of hilos, threads in Spanish, reflects
their interest in the question of identity and its malleable relationship to
place, natural concerns to immigrants in this multicultural time in this
diverse place. The threads also serve, according to the artists’ joint
statement, as connectors between people and nature, bridging realms usually
considered separate; in visual terms, they connect and unify Lopez’s portraits
and animals and Davila’s painterly abstractions, synthesizing drawing and
color, opposing aesthetic camps in the early nineteenth century painting, but now,
in the twenty-first century, partners. While the paintings, which the artists
pass back and forth, sometimes over long periods, have resemblances to their individual
works, it’s clear that the partnership creates, in effect, a third artist, and
that this tertiary work feeds their solo works as much as they in turn nourish /eE.l.os/.
The product of a long discussion between friends during a
long drive, and subsequent brainstorming, the artists’ FAUNA series examines animals’ ability to adapt to changes in their
environment, a lesson in flexibility and realism easily extrapolated to humans now
facing environmental challenges. /eE.l..os/’s artist statement:
The subject of this series is the
process of transformation where the individual, depicted as an animal, becomes
one with the place. The animal becomes the place and the place becomes the
animal. For the artists, as native Spanish speakers, the verb “TO BE” can have
two meanings: the state of being in a place (‘estar’) and a definition of who
we are (“ser”). This duality is central to the dialog that takes place between
the environment and the animal. They interact with each other, developing a
joint identity, much as it happens in life, where our actions help define and
shape us and the environment around us…. Each painting starts with the
abstraction of a place. Andreina gives, color, texture and form to the idea of
an open, yet inviting environment. Then, Ytaelena imagines who could inhabit
here, and, line by line, an animal form comes to life. Last, we weave this
interaction between the two different forms: fauna and place become one… In a
time when our relation to what we call “home” is questioned by issues like
climate change, immigration and gentrification, Fauna represents a break, a moment to breathe and imagine what
would be possible. (From website, http://eelos.com/About-eE-Io-s)
The
mixed-media works on panel depict wild animals in natural environments, but they
are far from naturalistic, or, at least, merely naturalistic. Ytaelena Lopez’s
freely but incisively sketched animals are recognizable, but her meandering
black line (which recalls Egon Schiele’s)—complemented by white lines and
shades of ink wash—follows realism only loosely, even playfully, carving the picture
space into animal form, or perhaps spirit-animal form: the animals are often
left white, suggesting absences, or rendered as semi-transparent, with the
background coming through. Deer, coyotes, foxes, lions, capybaras, chimpanzees,
chameleons, whales — each species is memorialized and commemorated, the living
individual being transformed into a representative of its species, perhaps
endangered or already extinct. A century ago, the German Expressionist painter
Franz Marc depicted animals—spiritual blue horses and yellow cows, famously—as
embodiments of purity and instinct, sometimes in harmony with their
surroundings, sometimes threatened by invisible forces. (Marc was killed at the
Somme, in 1916.) Frederick S. Levine, in his study of Marc, described
expressionism as
…a socially involved art, an
art that sought to communicate the depths of its involvement with and concern
for mankind….Expressionism sought to reach out beyond the confines of the
individual selk and to establish contact with the broad mass of humanity.
Indeed, Expressionism reflected an anguished longing for community which, when
carried to its extreme, represented an attempt to establish a unified and
harmonious relationship between the mortal isolated individual and the eternity
and universality of the cosmos.1
I see
the innocent animals of /eE.l.os/ as performing a similar service for our
endangered and not-so-innocent anthropogenic era. If this sounds overly serious
to viewers who resist what George Grosz called Tendenzkunst, tendentious art,
or sociopolitical art, the works, like Marc’s and unlike Grosz’s, are visually
complex and surprising, and quite beautiful.
Ytaelena Lopez’s stylized, semi-abstract backgrounds—large patches of
pure color modulated by tones and organic textures to suggest natural habitats,
phenomena and processes—offer aesthetic delight and even mystical transport
that transcend the current realities of politics and business. The abstract and
the figurative merge, just as the artists’ individual personalities merge into
the creative partnership, creating a visionary, spiritualized world reminiscent
of the peaceable kingdom paintings of the nineteenth-century Quaker artist,
Edward Hicks.
The
supposed conflict between beauty and seriousness in art that we take for
granted nowadays is incorrect: art need not choose between being either eye
candy, superficial or sublime, or politically correct propaganda, bitter, but
good for you, or, that egregious synthesis of vapidity harnessed to
pretentiousness. The art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto wrote, about what
he calls our kalliphobia, our fear
and hatred of beauty, as inherited from the Dadaists, disgusted by the
hypocrisy and waste of the Great War. Unfortunately, the desire to shock and
disgust, “to make people scream,”2 in Max Ernst’s words, has now
become the established practice taught in art schools; it has been co-opted by
the market.
Davila and Lopez cite in their
artist statement the ancient Greek term kalokagathos,
or kalo k’agathos, “beautiful on the
outside and noble on the inside.”3 Carried to extremes, it is a
dubious equation, of course; the execution of the homely seventy-year-old
gadfly, Socrates, by gym-toned Athenians (considered middle-aged at thirty)
ought to make us wary of superficial judgments based on appearance. However, given
the current enslavement of contemporary art to market forces, perhaps it is
time to acknowledge again, with Keats, that truth can be beauty, and vice
versa, and reconsider artworks like those created by that third person, /eE.l.os/,
that function as beautiful and wise kaloi
k’agathoi.
1 Frederick S. Levine, The Apocalyptic Vision: The Art of Franz
Marc as German Expressionism, p.5
2 Arthur Danto, “Kalliphobia in
Contemporary Art; Or, What Ever Happened to Beauty?” reprinted in Unnattural Wonders: Essays from the Gap
Between Art and Life (2005), p. 323
3 Bettany Hughes, The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the
Search for the Good Life, p. 234
