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Sublimacao

by Ana Nitzan

Photographs: Ana NItzan

Publisher: BESI Brasil

Year: 2014

Price: 65 €

Comments: hardcover, first edition. Design: Letícia Coelho

https://vimeo.com/132673405

by Eder Chiodetto

Images invite the eyes not to rush, but to rest for an instant and to abstract with them in the exhilaration of his revelation.

A Mythical Image , Joseph Campbell

Standing before a large tree whose florid canopy was imposing majestically on the landscape, the artist Ana Nitzan was taken to a moment of reflection on its place in the world, the limitations of the human being in relation to nature and, consequently, the impotence gaping of photography in an attempt to faithfully represent this vision.

This instant founder of a thought can be understood as the cathartic moment in the creative process of an artist, the one from which a work will be generated. It is when the outside world sensitizes and moves the gear of artistic becoming, to the point where the artist feels called to walk through his labyrinths, between uncertainties, intuitions, trials and accidents, until he finds the most genuine form of representing a certain state of things .

"As I looked at that tree, I felt small in the face of the uncanny grandeur of nature. To register it, I lay on the floor as if bowing. So I photographed from two different angles, leaving the horizon line like a fillet, to remind us of our smallness in the face of all this, "says the artist.

Back in his atelier, analyzing the images he had captured, he observed the two faces side by side. Surprise. When they joined the faces, the trees appeared without trunk, without contact with the ground. It was as if they were flying.

When photographing the two sides of the same canopy, in an attempt to force the boundaries of the photograph to allude to the three-dimensionality of the referent, the artist casually created the illusion of a levitation. Was this image now confronting the metaphor, the poetic translation of the illumination he had felt when he came upon the tree in the field? It seemed so. But it lacked an element that would return the volume, the outline, the thickness of the tree. The line.

"In several objects that I develop, I use the line. Be the line of the drawing, or the one of sewing. In both cases it connects ideas, concepts. It unites the universes of drawing and photographic construction. The drawing line is the same as stitching the landscapes lost in time. The line embarrasses, unites, mends the tear, heals the open wound of time that has been lost.The line stitches the plot of childhood torn by the trauma of life, "says the artist.

Stitching the two faces of the tree in the reverse side of the photographic paper and opening it, as if opening a book - a metaphor for the source of knowledge - Ana Nitzan was able to unite the aesthetic and conceptual points that interweave the poetic and philosophical questions that awoke her at that first moment before the tree in the field.

This image-upheaval organically synthesizes the vital cycles, the transcendence, the spirituality. At the same time, he speculates poetically about the limits of representation, of our visual perception, of our gaze to the environment.

It remains to smash the tree as a symbolic power in this circuit of refutations between the sensory becoming and the aesthetic enlightenment that the Sublimation images announce. The Dictionary of Symbols ( 1) , a reference adopted by the artist in her researches, synthesizes the meanings of the tree for her:

Living cosmos in perpetual regeneration ... Symbol of life in constant evolution and ascending to the sky, the tree evokes all the symbolism of verticality: see, as an example, the tree of Leonardo da Vinci. On the other hand, it also serves to symbolize the cyclical aspect of cosmic evolution: death and regeneration. Above all, the hardwoods evoke a cycle, since they are stripped and re-covered with leaves every year.

The tree also puts in communication the three levels of the cosmos: the underground, through its roots always exploring the depths where they are buried; the surface of the earth, through its trunk and its lower branches; the heights, by means of its upper branches and its top, attracted by the light of the sky. Reptiles creep up among their roots, birds through their branches: it thus establishes a relationship between the world of the Celtic and the Uranian world.

(1) Symbols Dictionary, Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant publisher Jose Olympio (2012)

Ana Nitzan is a collecting artist of worlds, file organizer. In her atelier in São Paulo, where she maintains the frequency and discipline of a regulated employee, she is surrounded by materials and materials that serve as her propulsion. It is their nest and their labyrinth, where losing oneself to find themselves are not necessarily antagonistic ideas.

Ana Nitzan's work unfolds in spirals in which the experience with nature, the relationship with the family, her readings and travels, photography, objects, drawings and seams are articulated by a curious and investigative worldview crossed by inquiries metaphysics. The enigmas that surround human beings in their deepest and most disturbing questions about existence, their vulnerability, the awareness of finitude, the desire for transcendence, the perception of these states in the cycles of nature interest him.

"I look for the answers ... I like to make some sense of the seemingly inexplicable. Art is a good place to speculate about it, "he says. To show Ana Nitzan's research more generously in her atelier and how broad and coherent the horizon of possibilities it conjures up, we create notebooks with drawings, objects, collages and a myriad of notes.

We seek to enable the rich experience of walking through the fissures of images and the artist's imagination, uniting the points of her creative process and entering this territory of delicacy, which also embraces fierce clashes in search of a legitimate expression.In the universe of these trees that ascend and symbolize the lightness there are polarities that face us all the time. As Gaston Bachelard put it, "There is no evasiveness, no flower, no flower without a work of the filth of the earth. Good comes from evil. " Or, as Ana Nitzan's grandmother philosophized among pots: "My daughter, the trees do not grow up to the sky."

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