Natasha Zupan

ADAPTATION/COUNTERSHADING

¿Cuál es el misterioso proceso por el que las mariposas geómetras adaptan el color de sus alas a los cambios de color de la Naturaleza? ¿Qué extrema sensibilidad hace que la luz de los árboles se plasme en el diseño de su camuflaje? No conozco la respuesta, y de hecho prefiero contemplar los milagros como parte del sorprendente flujo de la vida.

What's the mysterious process that makes Geometra Butterflies match the hue of their wings to changes of the color of Nature? What kind of extreme sensitivity enables the light of the trees reflect on the patterns of their camouflage? I don't know the answer, and to say the truth I prefer to look at these miracles as a part of the astonishing flow of life.

Creemos que la belleza es lo bonito, pero no es así: la belleza procede de la adaptación a las situaciones de amenaza. La Naturaleza crea formas de supervivencia, contra la muerte. Así el color o la forma en ella no son jamás un mero aderezo estético, ni un concepto bonito, divertido o un simple juego. Y tal vez lo que llamamos arte es también una misteriosa forma de adaptar nuestra sensibilidad a los dramáticos cambios de la historia humana, de los panoramas psíquicos y físicos. Es una forma de afrontar el peligro, mediante la metamorfosis.

We think beauty is (the) nice, but it's not: beauty comes from the adaptation to the situations of threat and danger. Nature develops extraordinary forms of survival, against death. Thus color and shape in Nature never are a mere aesthetic garnish, nor a nice, amusing concept or a simple game. And maybe that thing we call art is also an enigmatic form to adapt our sensibility to the dramatic changes of the human history and our physical and psychic panoramas.

La obra de Natasha es la más cercana a la alquimia de las mariposas que conozco. No trabaja a partir de los juegos conceptuales que enfrían el arte contemporáneo, sino desde la narración y la poética sensible de la vida. El colorido de sus alas se adapta no a la corteza del árbol o a la flor, sino a las escenografías que sirven de fondo a nuestras historias, es decir, a nuestros deseos, a nuestros momentos de éxtasis o miedo, a todos los sutiles cambios de nuestra alma en un mundo de diseños, materias y formas variables. La sensibilidad de Natasha reproduce un mundo sinestésico de relaciones con los escenarios de la vida. No trata de reflejar ideas prefijadas, sino que trabaja con la foto-sensibilidad de una hoja, de la piel, de los ojos y el alma para captar el momento y su eternidad.

The work of Natasha is the closest I know to the alchemy of butterflies. She doesn't play the conceptual games that freeze the contemporary art, but the narrative and the sensitive poetry of life. The coloring of her wings doesn't match with the bark of the tree or the flower, but with the scenographies that we use as a background to our stories, that is to say, to our wishes, to our moments of ecstasy or fear, to all these subtle changes of our soul in a world of designs, materials and variable shapes. Natasha's sensibility renders a synesthesic world of connections with the settings of life. She doesn't try to manage prefabricated ideas; she works with the photosensitivity of a leaf, of the skin, of the eyes and the soul to seize the moment and its eternity.

Sedas indochinas de finales del XIX, bordadas a mano que cubrieron un sofá o sirvieron de cortinas, vestidos de bailarines, pieles, el vestuario de un teatro destruido por el fuego o recortes de periódicos y revistas pueden servir de vehículo, no sólo físico, sino anímico y narrativo a su pintura. Y la transparencia, el momento de transición entre la carga temporal de la seda −que emplea como soporte de sus pinturas en esta exposición− y la segunda piel de la pintura, es la plasmación del milagro: el instante en que el sueño se superpone a la memoria táctil, en que el pasado se enfrenta al presente, y la tradición artística a las contradicciones y rupturas del arte contemporáneo... La obra de Natasha no se reduce a un concepto que puede abandonarse para pasar a otro más chocante. Su obra contiene poesía y éxtasis, profundidad y transparencia, sensibilidad y técnica, y su contemporaneidad va más allá de la moda y de los clichés del presente. Su contemporaneidad es anímica, sutil, capaz de variar a la luz de nuestros ojos como lo hace la piel de un camaleón.

Hand embroidered Indochinese silks from the endings of nineteenth century that cover a sofa or served as a curtains, or garments of ballet dancers, furs, the wardrobe of a theater destroyed by the fire, cut-outs from newspapers or magazines can be used as a vehicle, not only material but emotional and narrative to her paintings. And transparency, the transition between the temporal load of the silk −that's the support she uses for the paintings of this exhibition− and the second skin of her brushwork, is the expression of the miracle: the moment when the dream combines with the tactile memory, when past faces present, and the artistic tradition challenges the contradictions and the ruptures of contemporary art... Natasha's paintings are not just concepts that one can be left behind to catch another more shocking ideas. Her work holds poetry and ecstasy, deepness and translucency, sensibility and skill, and her contemporaneity goes beyond the trends and the clichés of the present. Her contemporaneity is spiritual, subtle, able to vary the light of our eyes like the skin of a chameleon does.

El arte de Natasha vive en el presente y en el futuro porque es fruto de una tensión que procede de su experiencia vital y su resistencia a negar los hallazgos de los grandes artistas del pasado. Pues negarlos puede ser una reacción necesaria en los momentos experimentales, pero creer que es posible avanzar sin reinterpretar sus obras supondría vaciar de contenido el arte futuro. Supondría vaciar el arte de mística, de narración, de emoción física, de visualidad y, lo que es peor, de dimensión. Natasha sabe que las imágenes y las novedades del futuro se incuban en la imaginación de nuestros antecesores, no en el vacío. Sin embargo, la visión de Natasha es mucho más que una simple dialéctica entre experimentación y tradición: su calidad procede de una intuición natural de los procesos de metamorfosis. Su magia no es intercambiable ni reductible a explicaciones. Preguntadle al tigre, a los plumajes del pájaro, a los patrones de la cebra, al insecto-hoja, a las flores... Preguntadle a las mariposas si queréis conocer su secreto.

Nathasha's art evolves in the present and the future because results from a tension that comes from her living experience and her resistance to deny the finds of the great artists from the past. Since to deny them can be a necessary reaction in periods of experimentation, but the idea that we can move forward without a reinterpretation of the work of the masters would suppose to remove the contents of art. It would suppose empty art from mystic, narration, physical emotion, visualization and dimension. Natasha knows that the images and novelties of the future hatch in the imagination of our predecessors, not in the void. However Natasha's view is much more than a simple dialectics between experimentation and tradition: the quality of her work comes from a natural intuition of the processes of metamorphosis. Her magic is neither exchangeable nor reducible to explanations. Ask to the tiger, to the plumage of the bird, to the patterns of the zebra, to the leaf-insect, to the flowers... Ask the butterflies if you want to know her secret.

Felipe Hernandez, 2005

Flesh Fold

The secret life of clothes comes alive in Zupan's art. This exhibition celebrates the mutual attraction and overlap between art and fashion. Found garments float and seem to sit serenely in imagined dowry box pieces. Zupan collects and then reconstitutes used clothing and accessories which once wrapped a body part. By submerging them in latex, and then mixing them with wax, oil, leaves, gesso, and pigments, she makes the clothes her own. The pictures consist of dresses, undergarments, gloves, stockings, fur and hair, kneaded and reworked to constitute the main shape of impression within the box of the actual stretcher. They are recent relics, rephrasing a human life. The clothes are coded with body fluids that were either her own, or someone close to her.

Reminiscent of Sigmar Polke's alchemy paintings, Zupan's work is about the process, that permits chance and intention to meet. Whereas Polke's painting set in motion processes that are related to paint and nature, Zupan's paintings are about material and the human figure. They celebrate not only the luxurious nature of the material, but possible histories of those who wore them.

Zupan's paintings literally and figuratively seduce and repulse the viewer in their tactile nature and subject matter. In 'Passage' a black beaded slk dress with fanned pleats is twisted, stretched and pushed into the stretcher, emerging as a dark figure. The central form seems to be bound in some ancient ritual. The dress, possessed by a strange voodoo trance, seems about to give birth on the dead leaves which are contained by a delicate piece of black lace wrapped around the wooden stretcher. Materials have been literally pushed through the medium. The result is violent and tumultuous. 'Passage' is like a black swan in bondage. Issues of sexuality are never distant. The reference to mythology, from Leda and the Swan to tarring and feathering give us an uneasy feeling. The field of references expands as we examine the details. Fleeting emotions and extreme ones are captures in this body of work. The ambiguities in these images are not unintentional.

In 'Floored' copious amounts of material are kneaded and pulled beyond and around the corners of the stretcher. The wedding dress, twisted and wrinkled, recall old master paintings of laundresses. Here, the artist becomes the many hands of laboring washerwomen and the heavy mass of their wet linens lies upon the wood. It is a faux marbleized slab, a wilted bride. 'One night stand', made up of a tulle petticoat spread upon a carpet seems to be taking her final bow. Her dress has been discarded onto another black dress in a private farewell. The dresses swell, then deflate and seem to freeze.

A priestess, rather than an alchemist, Zupan conjures the stories of those who wore the clothes, however briefly. In this way the artist conceptually wears the clothes. She finds her past through these works. Each painting represents a tactile memory. In 'Numb', made gloves, latex, stockings and wax, the artist revisits a suitcase or drawer full of intimate garments which are now sunk in wax. Who, we wonder. did these belong to and what stories could the tell?

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, 2000

Lures

The recent works of Natasha Zupan (Georgia 1965) are both a point of departure and a settling clown in her trajectory. The pleasure in handling fabric is maintained, but her attitude has changed. Before she had taken apart outfits in simple fragments of materials with which she formulated collages; now she integrates the garment, in its totality, as an element that rivets the work of art. It is not only the material that generates attraction, but also the manner in which it is contrived: a garment ends up enunciating more than a fabric, it must enhance the body it has to cover and, at the same time, this grants different meanings. It goes beyond interest in the texture --such as it is-- from the moment the living quality accompanying it takes on importance. She plays at creating, starting with dresses because these are subjects of the temporality of fashion. We would say, after all, that the artist's interest unites a fabric with experience in this object which is each and every garment we use, cast aside, keep or hanker after.

Clothing has an intimate relationship to the fabric itself. Both can be considered veils. Although the expression "woven out of life" speaks eloquently of the symbolism of the material, it also does so of the garment. It concerns not only the relationship between attraction and growth - by mixing diverse elements such as weaving and warping, textile and seam, passive and active states (in which the act of sewing or weaving is equivalent to creating), but also a particular mystical intuition of phenomena through which the world appears hidden by a curtain that obscures our vision of the real and the profound. In like manner, clothing - our second skin - separates our private and public selves, confusing what we are and what we want to be.

The development of the work of Natasha Zupan expresses the evolution of her involvement in the symbolic factors of clothing. In her one-woman show in 1990, at the Gallery V in New York, she showed her first collages, influenced by the paintings of Gustav Klimt and Pierre Bonnard, two magnificent painters who worked with great elegance on the feminine silhouette and dress. Going back to her works with Renaissance references, where the artist "extends a bridge between classicism and abstraction" . Such works can be interpreted through her chosen repertoire of symbols - which include the body and the dress as containers of personal experience and vehicles for the expression of the duality of her artistic development - between figurative and abstract expression.

We can cite this stage as Carrefour (1995) and Chalis 11 (1997), both carried out in mixed technique on wood. In the first, before the interposition of diverse elements, colors and images, there prevails in the center of the painting a sleeping angel, shown as a winged woman wrapped in a large veil, with the pleats of the material standing out. In the second an authentic bit of patterned fabric takes on importance preponderance in the composition.

In the series inspired by Lewis Carrol's novel Alice in Wonderland, the artist identifies with the protagonist of the text and ironically represents herself as Alice. Imaginary situations are set up which have to do with facing maturity and, with the change in her creative quest. These works become autobiographical, conjugating figurations of the past with new artistic codes, as if the real life of Natasha Zupan, like that in the inverted world of the novel, might presuppose that "the true is a moment of the false".

In Another Blunder (1998), for example, she alludes to loss of innocence and initiation into adulthood. Alice's face remains covered --since all that can be seen is her wide skirt, her stockings and shoes-- incorporating memories of a Goya painting and a large red spot. A cat appears in the lower part of the painting. It could be the Cheshire Cat or the artist's own cat who tries to leap to an earth that has been reduced to a fragment of fake leopard skin. In the case of the Meninas Eléctricas (1999), Alice becomes a new maid-in-waiting re-interpreted from that of Velázquez and reproduced in series. In all these representations, the dress is implicated in the different roles which presuppose presuppose Alice's vital stages.

But in the ensemble of the mentioned propositions clothing and fabric were complementary recourses, whether as materials that could be utilized in her collages or as signs to accompany other ideas. Natasha Zupan's decision to work directly with the dress-object arose after a search for materials for her collages in a Barcelona market. Coming across some old dresses from the Liceo, the artist recalls that when they were shown to her, she was captivated: "When I saw them, I fell in love with them. Their forms were living material of past. I was fascinated by the idea of working with material that might have come from the stage, which had been used for a performance. Each dress had its own history, I only had to let myself be carried away by what it might suggest to me".

As a container for the body, clothing is a material element that covers a presence and alludes, at the same time, to an absence. From those performances only empty dresses remained and they were rescued by Natasha. So, beginning with used costumes she began a large number of pieces with the integral presence of the dress. Later, she worked with her own garments and with those of close friends. For the artist, clothing is no longer just covering for the body but something which shows the body: it is an element of protection, of property, of intimacy, but, at the same time, of seduction. And so she continues creating very evocative work such as My Drawers lI (1999), where, after the first impression of a painting in relief, one discovers a world of intimate feminine garments. Black Widow (1999) and White Dress (1999) are monochromes in which the dress is distinguished by its anatomical lines, the details of its accessories and the insinuating lift of the skirt.

In her process of creation --in which, besides fabric, she uses several materials such as plaster, sand, nets, branches, latex and oil over the support-- she combines the chemical with the alchemical to achieve her objects of transformation. Though physically the dress is shaped, the spectator can perceive movements, imaginary trajectories of seduction, moments of dressing and undressing, bodily traces, vestiges and measurements. Several relevant artists have used pieces of clothing in their works. But in the framework of their symbolic references, despite the differences in mediums, materials and contents, a relationship could be established between Natasha Zupan's focus and that of artists like Louise Bourgeois, Annete Messager and Rosmarie Trockel. Starting with her clothes, Bourgeois reconstructs her personal memories, giving them a second life in her sculptures. Messager, on the other hand, encloses bridal gowns in boxes, giving them the status of relics. Trockel explores signs of sexual differences with the garments in her montages.

Together with the mentioned chance and personal associations that can be connected with other artists, for Natasha Zupan the codes of dressing also regulate the desire to seduce and mark the passage of time beyond the concealment or interest for the fetish object. The garments can carry along marks of their own and others' pores, but they insinuate for an instant and forever their hidden hazards and somber destinies. The artist is conscious that in any case, it would be difficult to find the same savor in all of the outfits, as if there might be a kind of irreproducibity tied to a moment, to one determined fold, to a color. Fashion ends up being a game of time within time. With the clothes she not only delineates the form of a body, but the fragrance of a specific period. Clothes change in cyclical fashion, renew themselves, construct and reconstruct themselves over their past. "A dress no longer changes because it has worn out, but because it possesses the specific character of being the dress of the moment while waiting for the next".

The work of fashion designers represents creation applied to clothing, where each one elaborates a concept that is projected in every garment of a collection. The finished piece-object, the brand, is the consequence of several stages, like the process of creation of this artist, from obtaining material, going through the scheme of the patterns, different stages of confection and application of accessories. For Natasha Zupan the creator is a name that by itself suffices as text, and on this occasion she is working with dresses from designers of fashion. The garments that such designers conceive are constituted in new vehicles that allow her to express her concerns about the ensemble of the new object thus sketched out, transforming them into a form of artistic expression, as is this field of design, to another different and personal one. Her idea attempts to convert an object designed for ephemeral utility into a work of atemporal art.

What is wounding to Roland Barthes in photography, the punctum, is also a constant presence in her works: a detail, a pleat, an imperceptible cadence, which in itself punctures the look and remains like a discrete savor, imperceptible, like the inexplicable sense of memory. Each reinterpreted dress of Natasha Zupan is a lure. Each work congeals the image of a moment, of an empty container. We shall never know which body it might have wrapped.

Alban Martinez Gueysand, 2000

Symbolic content of historical dimension

"Nature has created in this place the most fantastic dreams that poets and painters can imagine" wrote George Sand." A vast assembly of infinite detail, endless variety, pronounced shapes and vague depths; all this one finds in the landscape of Valldemossa".

In this appropriate setting, her studio overlooking a quaint valley, Natasha Zupan speaks of beauty, that concept much confused in the art world, as elsewhere. Whether considering the phenomenon from a psychological standpoint, an epistemological or axiological one, in the final instance we look back to Plato in confronting two extremes: ideal and subjective beauty.

The relationship between art and beauty will forever arouse debate. Some, like the philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood, deny any meaningful relationship whatsoever between art and beauty. However, there are those who maintain the the principle objective of art is the material representation of beauty and Natasha Zupan can be numbered among them. Her work holds evocative historical symbols essentially translated through light, color, and her uniquely personal poetic tone.

In Natasha Zupan's canvases, great attention is given to ornamental detail, Clear, bright brush strokes build into human forms. The refined academic hand dissolves into a rhythmic play of light and shadow and a deeply suggestive use of space.

In astronomy we look to Copernicus; in politics to Machiavelli; in ethics to Erasmus and in art to Leonardo. Throughout Europe, there has hardly been an artistic movement which was not influenced by the Renaissance. Indeed, even vanguard movements of this century – the surrealists for example – make reference to the artistic language of that last classical age, though perhaps most often by contrast. It is no less evident that in the question of taste, each successive age has internalized the renaissance canon, and consciously or unconsciously, judged the most varied styles against its criteria. This holds true whether we consider the printed word or graphic art and museums, or more recently such channels of mass communication as the cinema, television and multimedia formats. Such artists as Michelangelo, Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo and Dürer are not merely specimens of their age, but archetypes, ultimate arbiters of Beauty. Ask any average person in the western world to name his favourite works of art, and (perhaps after a few local favourites) the respondent will soon list Leonardo's Gioconda, Michelangelo's Moses, or Botticelli's Birth of Venus. Renaissance taste remains the paradigm today.

We can draw a certain parallel between the history of art since the Renaissance and the fortune of the Hellenistic style subsequent to the Age of Pericles. Each era left an enduring aesthetic legacy, one which sought to run against it. Thus we speak in both cases of classicism, in as much as we refer to the crystalization of an aesthetic mode into a historically influential model or ideal.

Natasha Zupan's reference to renaissance art is unavoidable, and it gives her work a maturity of stylistic forms from which she bridges to abstraction. Using various media, she reworks the original sketches to great effect. From there, the perfect balance of composition and the pursuit of harmony join to consecrate a very personal concept of beauty and art. Each canvas superimposes a certain intensity of technique with the ambiguous languor of the figures, contrasting qualities in permanent dialogue.

Bridging past and present, Natasha Zupan share with us the enigmatic and suggestive oeuvre of her instinctive aesthetic fascination.

Gudi Moragues Jaulin de Seutre, 1997

Marie Antoinette from 'Elle Decor', March 2007
For Swarovski, Miami Basel 2006 and Milano 2007