BOOK REVIEW: LORIEN SUAREZ KANERVA 'COALESCING GEOMETRIES'
A “Neo-Modernist” tendency has endured in artistic practice around the world – Western and otherwise – all throughout the many crises of contemporary art. One persistent development bespeaking the persistence of Modernism (certainly in its neo-Modernist guise) can be called “Reconstructivism,” returning as it does to the geometric – and fundamentally optical – language(s) of post-Cubist non- objectivity. In her paintings Lorien Suàrez-Kanerva evinces that post-Cubist heritage, and the Modernist – now neo- Modernist – principles that heritage inheres.”
In fact, the whole construct of “heritage” plays a central role in Suàrez-Kanerva’s practice and self-regard. From the first she has regarded Modernist masters such as Kandinsky and the Delaunays (notably Sonia Delaunay-Terk) as her guiding spirits; their vision, of a visual world invented within but no less out of the natural world and applied to human society, is her vision. Whether impelled by the spiritual, as in the case of Malevich or Hilma af Klint; by logic, as in that of Moholy-Nagy; or by a conflation of the physical and the metaphysical, as in Mondrian or O’Keeffe, Suàrez-Kanerva has taken their language(s) of abstraction and their abiding seriousness of purpose as her own. She does not recycle their Modernism but embraces and transforms it. Her Reconstructivism truly seeks to reconstruct.
Suàrez-Kanerva maintains the Modernist spirit by admitting further to a mixed cultural heritage of her own – a very mixed cultural heritage that would more likely tear apart than unify a single artist’s practice. Venezuelan on her father’s side, Finnish on her mother’s, Suàrez-Kanerva operates from the access she has felt to two very different peoples – concentrating on what the artistic outputs of those two peoples, as ethnic groups and/or as communities, share with each other. Both Finland and Venezuela have contributed distinctly to Modernism: the European country, gaining its independence after the First World War, had given visual form to its cultural self-expression at this crucial time in Modernist history; while Venezuela, like its South American neighbors, saw a notable surge in avant-garde experimentation after the Second World War, a signal moment in late Modernism.
Finland’s kansallisromantiikka, in effect Jugendstil pressed into the service of a “romantic nationalism,” included a high-precision realism in painting, the angular stylizations and patterning of cutting-edge tapestry production, and, most famously, architectural innovations that anticipated Art Deco. The vibrant examples, then, of Akseli
Gallen-Kallela, Eliel Saarinen, and other artist-designer-architects of the independence generation have provided Suàrez-Kanerva bold models of formal elaboration. So, in a very different manner, have the influential styles of postwar Finnish and Scandinavian, especially – Danish, design (as well as the intrepid example of Swedish painter af Klint).
The Venezuelan impact on Suàrez-Kanerva has been more immediate, as it was central to her childhood spent in part in Caracas. She has distinct memories of a cityscape punctuated with sculptures and architectural installations by Jesus Raphael Soto, Carlos Cruz Diez, Alejandro Otero, and other non-objective artists interested in creating a melding of optical and architectural effect. These public works echoed, and often influenced, similar projects throughout the continent (and ultimately the world),and marked their makers as progenitors of the Op Art movement – a movement now remembered for its eye-dazzling artifacts, but marked in its heyday by the aestheticization of social space.
Like these exemplars in 1960s Venezuela and early-1900s Finland, Suàrez-Kanerva feels impelled by social and intellectual – and by extension spiritual – forces larger than she; and, like them, she responds to this impulse with an art that is at once standardized and personalized. That is, Suàrez-Kanerva’s compositions base themselves on highly regulated, often patterned structures, elaborations on arcs and curves as well as straight lines and enclosed forms, generated almost to the point of obsession. This is not to say that Suàrez-Kanerva dependably fills her pictures with repeated geometric detail, nor even less that she allows her imagination (much less her color) to be subject to the restraints of a compositional formula. Dense and rhythmic as her works can be, Suàrez-Kanerva never allows them to devolve into predictable designs; she always provides some sort of opening in her structure to allow her lines and shapes freedom, even erratic movement. Rather than march across the picture plane, her shapes swell and ebb, advance and withdraw, churn and rest, in a constant play of shape and light. However subtly, she always subsumes the strictures of the grid into the relationships of compositions as fluid as they are poised.
Suàrez-Kanerva’s main body of Reconstructivist abstraction falls within her rubric of “Wheel Within A Wheel,” a title indicative not only of the dominance of rounded forms, but of formal dynamics that are at once restless and perpetual. All her compositions radiate. Yes, they are visually radiant as self-defined images; but they also depend on the sense that one form is giving birth to the next, throwing it off like so many seeds or tendrils yet in a formally refined, even stylized manner, so that the structural quality of these images conjures the mapped interactions of sub- atomic particles as much as of floral or animal sexual energy. Suàrez-Kanerva’s Wheels Within Wheels speak of generation on all levels of existence.
More recently, the artist has returned to the specifically botanical impulse of her earliest paintings, realizing vivid, curvaceous images, at once languid and forceful, grouped under the title “Geometric Botanicals.” Allowing herself reversion to a more simply interpreted source, plants, Suàrez-Kanerva seeks to explore the less complicated and daunting metaphors the Wheel Within a Wheel paintings leave behind. Even so, Suàrez-Kanerva finds an elaborate world of form and energy in and among her Geometric Botanicals, one that allows her to translate such biological improvisations not just to canvas and paper, but to wearable cloth, as clothing and adornment.
Continually researching science and philosophy for further inspiration, Lorien Suàrez-Kanerva displays –
and reaffirms – the complex intellectual and spiritual motivations set forth in Modernist discourse, making her, as stated before, something of a neo-Modernist (specifically a Reconstructivist). Modernism demands of its adherents a sophisticated grasp of the universe, as much science as art, and demands a deep personal investment in the reconfiguration of that grasp. Some artists manifest this investment as an outpouring of expression: others, as a cultivation of a carefully deduced world view. With her keen sense of ethnic and cognitive multiplicity, Suàrez-Kanerva works between these two polarities, seeking rational form for mystical, or at least metaphorical, thought. Her painting, so readily appealing to the eye, is beautiful for a reason.
PETER FRANK is Associate Editor for Fabrik magazine. He is former critic for Angeleno magazine and the L. A. Weekly, served as Editor for THEmagazine Los Angeles and Visions Art Quarterly, and contributes articles to publications around the world. Frank was born in 1950 in New York, where he received a B.A. and M.A. in art history from Columbia University and was art critic for The Village Voice and the SoHo Weekly News and moved to Los Angeles in 1988. Frank, who recently served as Senior Curator at the Riverside Art Museum, has organized numerous theme and survey shows for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Venice Biennale, Documenta, and other venues.
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