Painting and Suggestion
Leila Tschopp
Painting and Suggestion
I remember one vivid winter’s day at Versailles. Silence and calm reigned supreme. Everything gazed at me with mysterious, questioning eyes. And then I realized that every corner of the palace, every column, every window possessed a spirit, an impenetrable soul. I looked around at the marble heroes, motionless in the lucid air, beneath the frozen rays of that winter sun which pours down on us without love, like perfecto song. A bird was warbling in a window cage. At that moment I grew aware of the mystery which urges men to create certain strange forms. And the creation appeared more extraordinary than the creators.
–Giorgio de Chirico, from “Mystery and creation”
Leila Tschopp’s art has that rare ability to make us take notice. It is silent; it stares you straight in the eye without blinking or a hint of guilt, the entire volume of its expression concentrated in those open eyes firmly planted in the middle of a face with immutable and hard features. It is a naked body that shows itself shamelessly outside the bedroom chamber. And in its unrelenting display, it exposes how it affects us, how it invades us without drawing closer or touching—no need to stretch out an arm to show how close we really are. That animosity runs through all of her work, each and every painting and installation—the installations are themselves always pictorial. The soul of her practice, that animosity is what has turned her work into a long essay on painting’s ability to summon with its presence another presence, one that is neither declared nor manifest inside or outside painting; to build perplexity on the basis of the familiar; to speak about something mysterious and never-ending; to render palpable how we are affected by the environment, by the emotional and potentially unsettling vibration—or nature—of that which surrounds us, be it image, territory, or constructed object; its ability to envision us as constant idea manufacturers. And, as Giorgio De Chirico—a natural choice as figure to show this metaphysical connection—wrote, its ability to grapple with strangeness or, I would say, within strangeness.
Rich smooth colors, precise edges, and a saturated palette with darker and lighter zones whose resulting contrasts produce a simultaneous sense of closeness and distance—these are the cornerstones of her painting’s aesthetic. The manufacture of her graphic canvases and boards is the result of a long exercise in juxtaposing and honing images that she projects and draws on surfaces and combines as she paints, images that are taken from her own photographs and from paintings made by others as well as memories of a pattern, a snippet of a construction or of topography, an imagined form. Underlying that process is determination to abstract representation and to represent abstraction and, in so doing, reach a formal synthesis suggestive of territories and atmospheres yet to be named, spaces impossible and dreamlike, images laden with symbolic potential and what appear to be stories that take shape on the basis of the connection we inevitably establish between parts. Tschopp’s work is also a story about painting’s resistance. Everything tends to reinforce or to protect the ideal of the painter as the champion of the pictorial surface; in her work she reenacts, in a manner both camouflaged and fresh, battles won in the joint historical effort that investigates and upholds 2-D reality.
Composition and Decomposition
“My early paintings had to do with somewhat existential questions,” explains Tschopp. “I tried to represent an atmosphere, a type of sensation or emotional state—that was enough for me at the time. Those paintings may have begun with that idea of experience, but they soon started grappling with the fact that there is a body in the space, something that triggers a spatial experience, and with the fact that there is a link between sensation and space. Which is how I became interested in the representation of space in history. […] At first, the references to spaces in my work were minor—just very synthetic interiors, a corner, a swath of wallpaper. That investigation gradually led me to the early Renaissance, where there was an idea of perspective, but it was still incipient—and that was exactly what I found interesting: there was a certain idea of depth but it was pretty shallow, a certain reference to space but a flat space you can’t get into.”
At the root of Leila’s pictorial project is the intention to create a space at once familiar and unknown, real and fictitious; a space that shows us a state of things that, though recognizable, is impossible—in other words, a space that is both extension and limit.
She identified what would be her synthetic language early on. Leila started painting in the mid-nineties in the studio of Argentine artist Carolina Antoniadis. In those early years, Tschopp made small-format paintings that combined heraldic symbols from her own family and images of interiors charged with emotional intensity, ushering in the fertile dialogue between symbol and territory, the frontal and the profound, that has characterized her art. The personal references in her work soon faded into the background, though, and she began to look to images of urban spaces captured as she wandered around Buenos Aires with her camera: she was drawn to both the formal characteristics of the city’s modern and rationalist forms and to the human density that its monumentality and functionality—and the experience they proposed—conveyed. During the same period, references to art history also began to make their eager presence felt—mostly art that represents reality and irreality in the same breath.
At that point, all the “snapshots” gathered like mental traces over the course of her research—imprints of the urban, the modern, the historical and the classical, with forms more or less precise—gave shape to her pictorial language. In a quick process, they configured a world characterized by the juxtaposition of images of disparate nature and scale, images schematic or schematized combined on the painting itself, the surface itself, space itself. The canvas stretch grew into panel or wall, which were layered in each installation. Images of monumental facades and steep terrains became common in her work, as did large triangular shapes that were paths shrinking into the horizon, tiles from terrace floors literally leaning on deep and limpid backgrounds; walls oppressive or modest; bits of staircases in different proportions and at different angles; and strange—and always empty—theatrical spaces in scenes that blended with common backgrounds—walls—engaged in a baroque (in the theatrical sense) dialogue in which paintings on stretches, and others on self-supporting panels or painted walls, redesigned the interiors where they were installed. Examples of this include the show Modelos ideales at Kiosco, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, 2010, and Modelos ideales at Galería 713, Buenos Aires, 2011.
Soon, the process of honing that she imposed on her points of reference from the beginning took on another similar rite of suppression which, for Leila, did not mean simplifying but rather testing out and challenging the pictorial form and its ability to express: paintings and images that, before, were placed on top of one another were now separated to be spread out on different surfaces and then laid out in the exhibition space in manner more conventional but that, nonetheless, dramatized the installation’s underlying concept. If each painting was less cluttered, so was the space it inhabited. The parts were called on to act as a whole, but as a whole more distant and mute, more abstract.
It was with the exhibition El salto (2012) that Leila ventured into installations less enveloping. That passage was equally radical for the production of her images: the process of decomposition yielded images unlikely for her imaginary, like two monochromes and the figure of a man jumping backwards, abstracted from any context—a body lost relatively early on and nowhere to be found in her paintings of “surroundings.” These “new” motifs were accompanied by the image of an almost golden river, an abstract composition suggestive of a large rise down the middle of which was a path; a tile terrace before a building resting on a set of arches; and a monumental reference to the waving forms of Argentine geometric artist María Martorell. Together, they brought to the gallery variety of textures, immobility and contortion, abstraction and figuration. Enigmatic due to the disparateness of its images, the installation El salto [The Leap]forced the viewer to disregard the autonomy and self-sufficiency of each paining to envision its possible dismemberment—what would that look like?—and reunion—in what set of circumstances?; and to see ourselves as builders of possible narratives. If, as art historian and curator Jimena Ferreiro reflected in the text published on the occasion of that show, Leila Tschopp set out “to paint the meanderings of images,” the viewer would channel them.
El salto enabled Leila not only to unfurl her imaginary (an arc of influences and references), to manifest her dogged will to paint Painting and Paintings, and to grapple with the power that how images are arranged has on the configuration of a discourse; it also acted as a device that allowed us to recognize ourselves in our vision, to envision ourselves looking.
There are still more instances of synthesis and abstraction in Tschopp’s work; they are related to a process of weeding out created environments. The desolatedness of city and landscape that we identify in Leila’s art is also the result of a gradual process. The vegetation of her first paintings slowly vanished and the landscape dried up until so arid and austere that, as the artist puts it, “it makes us feel […] hurled into the loneliness of our very interior.” Painting that interior is “a stubborn attempt to get out of one’s brain.” The starkness of that inner world resonates perfectly in the representation of the desert and of the plain, both struck dumb by the sun and its heat, and in the city and interiors, desolate carcasses, stages for nothing.
Polysemy and Form as Idea
Leila’s works are compositions at the cusp of the known. As Leila says, her aim is for them to gobble up “any air of familiarity.” We can recognize in them facades, floors, bleachers, railings, staircases. Maybe. Ceilings and skies true and false. Sometimes. Dark passages and zigzag hallways. Horizons broken by arid geographies. Vertiginous paths. Public spaces, spaces of transit, both open and closed. Spaces oppressive and spaces that promise infinity. Surfaces with their own light or charred by an imaginary sun. Bars, grids, symbols. Waters, mountains, mirages. Concrete art or walls that collapse, menacing. Pictorial naturalism, pure geometry, or absolute light and shadow. Tarps that are road, that are awning, that are flag, that are peak, that are the outdoors, that are dress, that are waves, that are skin, that are tarps. Crosses that are signal, that are window, that are letter, that are limit, that are light, that are grief, that are crosses. Lines that are hands, that are paint, that are drawing, that are welcome, farewell, and a cry for help. Depths that are flat. Precipices that are surface. Thicknesses that are surface. Tschopp’s art looks for the end of a form, for another form, even for the invisible form, the one hurled beyond the frontier of her painting
That polysemy that Leila finds—that back and forth between meanings—makes permanent reinvention possible for her work. And that means, in part, the ability to use her motifs in endless combinations, re-enacting images—that is, orienting new readings—according to the syntax chosen for each exhibition. That ability to always situate herself between one thing and another has to do with how she joins paint—materiality—and idea—irreality and timelessness. After having won its battle for autonomy, contemporary painting has managed to seize hold of those two worlds—the strictly pictorial and the conceptual—without giving up either.
“I have often wondered if it is possible to think without language because, for me, it’s vexing to be mediated all the time by a language that separates me from things in order to understand them,” says Tschopp in an interview published on the occasion of her 2016 exhibition El camino del héroe. Her pictorial language is, in fact, thought. In Leila’s work, architecture, territory, and mental image are liberated from reality and from their natural setting; they are at once immaculate and reconstructed, affected by perception, emotion, intuition, reflection, and the constructedness of their compositions, of their own order. Even her spaces seem inward-looking, overwhelmed by the task of conveying and giving shape to the unnameable or the still unnamed, of being image of a world with no words—one that appears to be prior to the social.
Body
As we mentioned briefly in the reference to El salto, the human figure appeared in Leila’s first paintings, some of which were even inspired by Balthus’s enigmatic and ambiguous bodies. That body was abandoned early on, though, for the sake of shifting a greater psychological weight to viewers. The absence of the figure takes the work resoundingly into the sphere of the dream
Even Leila’s two-dimensional works, like the ones in the series Modelos ideales [Ideal Models], attempted to engage viewers in that way, to implicate them insofar as body that attempts to understand and understand itself in those inhabited places. That appeal to the viewer became more direct when a certain theatricality appeared in her work in the form of empty stages or public and inner spaces constructed for an absent body. That situation is more poignant still in her installation projects, which imply as well movement on the part of viewers, and in enveloping works that seem to take shape around that body, like architecture. In her work, insofar as construction, the association is with props, which further underscores the imaginary tone.
Tschopp’s painting first expanded on to the floor and the wall in 2006, when Ana Battistozzi asked her to make a work for the open studio event organized at the Palacio de Correos. On that occasion, she made El contexto soy yo II [The Context is Me II]. While her intervention consisted simply of painting the existing architecture, the resulting space was clearly designed to be occupied. Gradually, her installations began making use of MDF panels to multiple the existing walls. Sometimes free-standing, other times leaning on the venue’s walls, they doubled perspectives, intensified angularity and vanishing lines, or contradicted the natural orientation of the spaces in which they were located, breaking the right angle between wall and floor that usually keeps viewers from getting dizzy. All of this would come to characterize her later installations that, crucially, focus on how to guide a visitor down a given path with the attendant physical and emotional consequences. In these works—a sort of new 3-D version of synthetic Cubism— the body is constantly thrown off-kilter: changes in points of view are superimposed as viewers advance into the work. Leila’s show at the Palais de Glace in 2009, Aún cuando yo quisiese crear, was one of the first interventions of this sort. In it, viewers walked through a painted entrance—that is, one rendered pictorial fiction—into a small space that was made even smaller by a large inclined surface that represented a tile floor—a reference to Lino Enea Spilimbergo’s Terracitas [Little Terraces] that would recur in Tschopp’s work—but here literally and pictorial folded in two. In front of it was a plane on human scale that did away with any trace of the orthogonal or the parallel, a plane that confronted us—in unnatural detail—with an architectural grid.
The body was manifested more and more in her art with different presences. Key to this process was the use of vinyl and linoleum tarps, which she started testing out during a residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013. Without foregoing the smooth and even quality of her paintings, those materials added a measure of gravity and malleability that brought gravity back into her installations; like plumbs, they underscore the physical and earthly reality of the subject-body that beholds them.
The tarps did not, however, imperil that double weight—symbolic and pictorial—in the rest of her work. When, in 2013, she exhibited Sin título [Untitled] at Ensayo General in Buenos Aires, she subjected that material to another test, engaging both of those worlds with startling power and simplicity. The work consisted of white tarp (some 4.5 meters tall and 1.80 meters wide) that hung down from the top of the wall and rested on a slim stretch of the floor. Printed on the middle of it was the intersection of two black lines—a black cross—that ran from top to bottom and left to right in what looked like an aerial view of a road crossing. Only a fold that ran diagonally over the width, almost in the middle, upset the flat fall of this flag-like tarp with a slight dump. That simple but opportune fold divided the surface in two. Like the awakening of consciousness, like a stone that, in its fall, shows us that what we thought was a mirage was water, the fold marked a tension: insofar as upward, that cross incited a certain spiritual strain in its almost authoritarian elevation, whereas from the fold down was sheer weight, fiber, paint itself poured in all its thickness out on the surface.
The tarp later took on other forms and even moved away from the wall to be suspended from different points, its fall suggesting vast Pampa roads in perspective in Diagrama #1: Movimientos Dominantes, Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti, Buenos Aires, 2013; choppy seas and mountain peaks in Camino del Héroe, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, 2016; ghostly presences in El regreso, Casa Naranja, Córdoba, 2018; and rickety quicksand-like floors befitting, for some, daydreams and, for others, nightmares in AMA, Galería HACHE, Buenos Aires, 2017. In all cases, the original shape of its manufacture remained unaltered. Leila’s intervention on the tarp consists of painting it in even colors until it takes on depth, and then hanging it from certain points so that, with that minimal gesture, it appears to be donning one of its many costumes, steeping the gallery in ambiguity. It is thick as a cured hide; heavy as a ceremonial garment or vestment from another era; impenetrable, resistant, and arid as the outdoors—an endless chain of suggestions follow in its wake.
Something similar happened when, in the show Vanguardia/Caballo de Troya/América at MACBA in 2016, she first used metal barrels. Leaning slightly at the edge of a platform or on the floor, the barrels seemed to come to life—though that life was brought to a sudden standstill. Hovering around the barrels was their resonance, the potential sound of their beating in the distance which might bespeak an imminent protest, uprising, march.9
Having flirted for some time with the imaginary of theater and with the universe of choreography—the mise en scéne of her work always suggested a set of potential movements—Tschopp finally included an actual body, the body of a woman, in the show AMA at Hache Galería, 2017. With the naturalness of one who grasps how to preserve the fiction that theater proposes, the return of the body expelled the viewer from the scene. Those “off limit” spaces that attracted Leila from the beginning and that we mentioned early in this text now appeared in literal form, as did the human figure, distancing us from the dream the work evoked not to interrupt or shatter it but to keep it intact and fresh, to hold it in an impossible permanence, in an eternity. A room in Tschopp’s classic synthetic language took shape in one of HACHE’s two galleries, a surreal space built on the long pictorial tradition of emotional and foreboding interiors that goes from Vermeer to Hopper, from Berni or Lacámera to Kuitca. In that room closed off by slender steel wires, a dancer performed a series of movements that, in their abstraction and repetition, took a domestic act into the world of the ceremonial but also of obsession. And from the outside, viewers, now made to see themselves within Leila’s installation as if within a mirror, witnessed the opening of a space so tenuous that it seemed about to flee this world; it was as if they could see the last trace of the last woman before she was sucked into her inner world.
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Writer and art critic John Berger, who spent his life grappling with vision, tells us in a 2016 documentary, “I had a dream in which I was a strange dealer, a dealer in looks or appearances. I collected and distributed them. And in the dream I had just discovered a secret. I discovered it on my own, no help. The secret was to get inside whatever I was looking at, get inside it. When I woke up from that dream I couldn’t remember how it was done. And I now no longer know how to get inside things.”
If there is one thing that Leila Tschopp’s art attempts to do time and again, it is, as Berger would have liked, to hold fast on to that fleeting dream and its order, its magical and timeless logic, and its ability to make us see what lies within things, to see their essential or imagined nature, to trap them at the moment they come before us, indiscernible as object and as idea. Altering the shifting and unstable reality of time—literally dressing it, occupying it, camouflaging it with her paintings and installations—and tirelessly testing out her slim catalogue of materials, palettes, and images, Leila silently approaches each of the territories and thoughts that her works bring forth, as if they were a collection of signals that slyly reach out to the viewer—now wide awake.
Alejandra Aguado