No. 47 / October 2023
Mihai Plămădeală, art critic
(article published in the exhibiton’s catalogue)
Viorica Jahn has an extremely rare gift to put into the artworks she makes more than her talent, but also her soul, attributes that faithfully mirror her inner structure and way of understanding painting. The argument is also valid in terms of how she interprets the world, respectively the “being there” (Dasein – in Heideggerian analytical sense). However, the most important thing is the universal dimension of this state of fact. Exploring the relationships between lines, contours, shapes and colors at a strictly morphological level, without the intention of representing real, palpable things, is an opportunity for the artist to expand her palette, but also to share with the public, in addition to the results of her painting, the way she thinks, step by step, her artworks.
Interestingly, both the artist and the art lover have to go through the same mental stages on their way to abstraction, the first as creator, the second as receiver, and they start from moving the center of interest from the subject to expression, through chromatic and shape relations, from reproduction, seen as a faithful copying operation, to nonverbal interpretation, based exclusively on the senses ( respectively on the view, in the case of painting, to which is added the tactile sense in the case of sculpture, as well as on the other senses, in the case of mangeable art, performances, multimedia installations and others).
The great challenge of abstract art, generally speaking, is the lack of concrete landmarks, whether narrative, thematic or formally recognizable, a challenge that a large part of the public does not face, at least not entirely, although, not infrequently, he inexplicably appreciates non-representative artwork. To understand abstract painting, the viewer is forced to leave the comfort zone, the one in which the subject is clear or decipherable and to focus on the problems of composition, chromatics and morphology, which are the same as in the figurative one.
The fundamental premise through which we must read the abstract forms of expression is that the painter assumes everything related to his artworks, legitimizing them and at the same time consecrating them in this way. Next we are dealing only with historical and theoretical aspects, with models, classifications, categories and so on. Each (abstract) image creator has its own manner, doubled by personality, training, skills and intentionality.
Analyzing the artworks she makes and through which she also introduces herself, we notice that Viorica Jahn is both an original and suprinsing artist. Her painting, always oil on canvas, exclusively belongs to the abstract area. The compositions that she conceives (or sometimes only disparate elements of them) start from certain real elements, derived according to her personal vision in abstract forms, which maintains minimal connections with the mental patterns that inspired them. In fact, according to the theory, the abstraction has its anchors, at visual or morphological level, in a certain concrete, be it imaging or physico-chemical. Related to the latter aspect, the materials or instruments used by the painter, brushes, knives, supports, pigments and oil drying agent are of the highest quality, providing maximum control over the materialization of artistic intentions.
The mechanism, seen not so much as an algorithm or recipe, but as a sequence of used processes, consists in principle in transposing straight lines into curved lines (and vice versa), respectively of positive volumes into negative volumes, which thus become more important than the contours that delimit them. In particular, the arc of the circle and the straight line play an important role in the creation of the artist, which is not, however, confined to the geometric abstraction. Once the real has been incorporated into the abstract, a morphological stage follows, one much more important than the idea from which it left, which remains only a visual pretext, that of the invention of shapes, structures and relationships between them, a process that expands the area of visual signs of graphic expression to that of chromatics. Paradoxically, her abstact it is not even a purely chromatic one.
In fact, the extremely complex relationships between invented forms and chromatic relationships are the strong point of the artist. She is interested in harmonizing the center of gravity of her artworks, determined by the color depth, with the visual vectors. Although the results are convergent, these two means of expression have their own algorithms, which leads to moderately kinetic effects in the act of reading images, enhanced by the waiting horizon of the spectators, forced to compare what they see with what they would actually expect to see.
From another point of view, Viorica Jahn is extremely pedantic and demanding with herself, reasons that make her completely plunge into the act of creation. Apart from trying to leave nothing to chance, not even happy road accidents or random volunteer processes (such as washing, mergers – where and when appropriate – of color contamination or palimpsest), the artist is constantly looking for new solutions, including the viable ones, previously discovered or invented. Surprisingly, she always achieves similar results in terms of chromatics and family of forms, although the path taken is always different. This aspect is legible, the viewer realizing that, although he is dealing, from one artwork to another, with the same chromatic system and with the same family of visual signs, all these are different in mood, atmosphere and intentionality.
For the painter, the stake is to capture in her paintings various moods, but because she refuses gesturalism, as a form of expression, and meditates for a long time on the stage results of her work, initial states often change, in the sense that once accessed, they are subject to the inherent transformations of thinking processes. Thus, many artworks suffer substantial changes, the final form being only the expression of the moment when the artist considered them finished.
The peculiarity previously reported is another important factor of unity for her artworks, because it encompasses in them the decision of their creator, not easy to take, that she managed to convey through them what she wanted, at least at some point. However, the decision that an artwork is completed is not final and irrevocable. As an art critic, the signatory of these lines has become aware over time of the transformation of good artworks (considered at one time completed) into others also good, in fact just as good. The term “ good ” was used in the previous argument without aesthetic or value connotations, in the idea of emphasizing the relativity and interchangeability of some parameters in the act of creation.
Returning, Viorica Jahn did not choose abstraction as a way of artistic expression, because in the world people used to paint and still paint abstractly, but because this approach is an identity factor for her. The color, unaltered by themes and subjects, represents the ideal opportunity for the artist to reconcile her inner states with the outside, seen by her as a universal self. Due to this extremely particular vision, the viewer can find himself in the artworks she proposes, which do not speak especially about her, but actually formulate interrogations about the nature of the being.
Finally, the title “My Abstract” is defining not only for the new and complex exhibition at the Palace of the Parliament, Bucharest, but for the entire creation of Viorica Jahn.