Graciela Hasper: Unexpected

Graciela Hasper's painting can be appreciated as paradoxes: their objective form, which continues the tradition of a chromatic and playful abstraction, is also emotional. Her painting remains free of all imitation and, at the same time, within the ribbons, circles and squares, the pure, saturated and vibrant colors share material without mixing but merely by modifying the tone or value. Emotion is transferred from the act of painting to that of perception, to the subjectivity of the sensations that colors produce or inspire. Hasper's painting captures the gaze and seduces with a pleasurable movement that, nonetheless, lacks a center. These are compositions that break away from the concept of stability by not having a fixed point upon which to gaze. The work never loses confidence in itself and in the possibility of continuing through the wall, of breaking the limit of the frame, but conserves its quality of dynamism within equilibrium. Unlike the concrete tradition, the wall is not a force field but rather the expansion of autonomous forms.

Hasper's painting is beautiful in itself, as Plato posits in the Philebus, unrelated to anything outside. It affects the viewer because it acts simultaneously with the fluidity of the shape, preferably curved, and the emotion of color. It allows us to move from practical subjects tied to reality to aesthetic subjectsby projecting ourselves into the object.

The illusory projection of pure contemplation, as Eduard von Hartmann suggested, has a metaphysical meaning. Does it, by means of pure creation, evoke the vital enigma of the absolute? Is there, perhaps, within this meandering of forms, a search for an explanatory principle of an unconscious nature?

Abstraction is the visual manifestation of an idea of representation, whose resulting image depends on both the act of the creator and the reception of the viewer. By denying the imitation of the real it becomes pure perceptual emotion. Here art acquires the ability to be an attribute (as a finite representation that limits the infinite will) of the Absolute. Is Hasper's painting the actual continuity of this spirituality? We will never know since, more than the act of the artist, and more intuition than consciousness, it depends on the belief system of each viewer.

Hasper's painting is a break from the unease of the contemporary world, although pain can only be suspended during the instant of the gaze, in the unexpected encounter with a beautiful form. It is here, perhaps, in which its powerful appeal resides: the ability to generate the fleetingness of a new world, a place of serene happiness alien to the violence of the world.

ROBERTO AMIGO

September 5 – October 19, 2019

Press Release