For the fifth contemporary counterpoint of the Nymphéas (Waterlillies), the musée de l’Orangerie has invited the Brazilian artist Janaina Tschäpe.
Janaina Tschäpe’s project is identical in its aim to Claude Monet’s declaration: “My only desire is a more intimate fusion with nature, and the only fate I wish for is, in accordance with Goethe’s precepts, to have worked and lived in harmony with its laws.” Her work – videos, drawing, performance and painting – takes its inspiration from contemplating nature, its elusiveness, and its metamorphoses. “To me painting means feeling something right up close, being physically in the present with body and soul. I could never explain to anyone this intimate dialogue with the canvas. My painting doesn’t come from pictures. It arises out of my observations, which can be observations of nature but just as well observations from fantasy.” With its strange, dreamlike atmosphere, her video Blood, sea immerses us in a colourful organic world, which is a free affirmation of her Brazilian culture.
After a childhood split between living and studying in Germany, where she trained at the HFBK art school in Hamburg, and São Paulo, the artist is now based in New York and has achieved international recognition for her work from institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, and the Musée national d’art moderne where she exhibited at “Elles@centrepompidou”. Janaina Tschäpe has produced a series of drawings for the Musée de l’Orangerie reminiscent of the notebooks which Monet filled with quickly sketched observations by his pond at Giverny. The artist interprets this work as a mind-body dialogue: “That comes more from my need to stay a bit longer with my canvas when the major work has been done. I often have an urge to still fondle my canvas for a while, for example with the pencil, to flit over the colored skin like a caress.”
“The element of Monet’s water lily paintings that has always fascinated me the most is the abstract gestures that underlie the figures. He had such a distinctive and expressive way to depict landscapes, and the essence of the paintings is very clearly Monet’s own interpretation of what he was seeing, translated through his gestures. The way Monet organizes these gestures to produce the overall image is, for me, a very interesting aspect of his work. It’s for this same reason that I am so intrigued by his drawings, because they represent the raw forms of these gestural marks, revealing the underlying composition and emotional drive without being obscured by the overall composition. Interestingly, Monet made an active effort to conceal the fact that he worked from sketches so as not to harm his reputation as the master of plein air painting. In the same way they have impacted me, Monet’s abstract gestures and the intense energy that underscore his paintings and, particularly, his drawings, were rich sources of inspiration for Abstract Expressionist painters in the mid-twentieth century. It’s this story that compelled me to produce drawings on canvas that would attest to the drawing as the final work while referring to the raw gestures behind my paintings.
To be specific, my gestures when making works on canvas are in constant flux with my emotions and internal state, factors which are out of any conscious control. Such turbulent influences belong to the complex universe of power that underlies the work, reminding me that any outcome, both in art and elsewhere, is necessarily a result of elaborate interactions of unfathomable scale. In fact, it was the same process that I noticed when filming Blood, Sea (2004), but this time with a different medium – water. The film itself is a composition reminiscent of my drawings, the colours, strings, and balloons of the costumes functioning like pencil and watercolour marks. As it was set in a natural spring, the active swirling of the water mediated the movement of the models in their tentacular costumes to produce an unexpected outcome that was simultaneously organic and choreographed. In a way, nature was working to continue the gestural brushstrokes initiated by the models in a manner that was out of my control, paralleling the influence of emotional state and the subconscious on my drawings.”
