1992 Galleria AOC58 Intimate Immensities (solo) testo italiano
By opening the catalogue for this exhibition, we have broken and passed through the confronting solidity of an image: a photograph of a cyclopean wall. In so doing we unconsciously pass through one of the fundamental structures that help to define life and reality, that provide the containment for power and place, into a place that exists within, that reverberates with the echoes of half-heard conversations, the traces of past events and faces partially glimpsed.
Looking at the work of Susan Kammerer I recall Gaston Bachelard’s book The Poetics of Space, in which he explores the significance of the various kinds of space that attract and concentrate the poetic imagination, and in particular his discussion of what he terms ‘intimate immensity’. He speaks of how “…we open up the world, as it were, by transcending this world seen as it is, or as it was before we started dreaming.”.
Kammerer’s work is rooted within the traditions and skills of drawing, printmaking and painting, both on the level of practice as well as in her knowledge of and reference to the art of the past. This allows a curious kind of layering to take place, where images from a number of sources become fused: the apparently mundane courses of the stone wall, absorbing the dynamism or weight of the compositional structure of, perhaps, a “seicento” painting, at the same time deploying the emotional power of colour to inform the image further. In Demeter & Kore colour illumines the chill of the stone to provide the emotional charge that activates the work. Colour releases allusion from the structure of the painting.
For these reasons we would be mistaken if we were to read Kammerer’s works as mere abstractions or transpositions of earlier masters. They function rather as meditations on the body of knowledge and culture of the past that remains perpetually available to us in the present. They allow us a glimpse of the images from antiquity that have continued to haunt, to obsess and to captivate. It is no accident that we re-find and re-discover ourselves through the same stories that we tell and hear again and again.
The artist works and reworks the image, both deconstructing and reconstructing, observing, adjusting, paying attention. It was also Bachelard who, in his exploration of the immense in the intimate, wrote “Attention by itself is an enlarging glass.”. That same enlarging glass is the mechanism that helps us to make sense of our world.
Deirdre O’Connell – March 1992
