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Alexandra Nechita
is coming of age in a post-modern universe. As she passes into her
teen years, and her precocity becomes less and less a provocative
issue, we can - we must - see her more and more for her accomplishments
as an artist per se. But in this day and age, those accomplishments
themselves can provoke unusual discussion, on several levels. Alexandra
Nechita and her art remain, literally as well as figuratively, remarkable.
No longer should, or can, we regard Nechita's artwork - painting,
drawing, prints, and more recently, sculpture - as a phenomenon
apart from historical or contemporary artistic discourse. Like the
performances of young concert soloists or pre-teen actors, Nechita's
work, beyond its youthful source, demands to be considered in light
of its time, place, and precursors. As such, we can see that Nechita
works in a distinctly modernist mode, conflating aspects of cubism,
expressionism, and (to a lesser extent) surrealism. She has thereby
determined for herself a style not dissimilar to that of the postwar
northern-European movement COBRA, in which the playfulness, even
buoyancy, of quasi-natural (including humanoid) forms veils a darker,
almost existential spirit.
COBRA itself took its cues form the art of outsiders - untrained
artists, children, even the insane. Nechita's art has from the beginning
sought a more sophisticated voice than that (commencing her career
as a child, after all, she has had no need to emulate children's
art), and in the conscious, even willful formal articulation she
brings to her images Nechita does take a few steps away from the
raw, if complex, passions invested in their art by COBRA painters
such as Asger Jorn, Karel Appel, and Pierre Alechinsky. Reacting
against their academy training, they idealized the concept of pure
spontaneity. Having recognized herself as an artist while still
young enough to manifest such spontaneity without forethought, Nechita
has moved in the opposite direction, acquiring knowledge and technique
through observation and training - but not to the point where the
impulse of her vision has become indentured to current or recent
stylistic prescriptions.
In that, Nechita still follows her
own muse, even to the point of contradicting contemporary mainstream
practices. By recapitulating, fusing, and ultimately personalizing
practices that were mainstream a half-century to a century earlier,
Nechita declares herself modernist to the core, and seems to resist
post-modern artistic doctrine. Or does she? At its most expansive,
post-modernism has promulgated a non-progressive, a-telelogical
understanding of artistic practice (Western or otherwise). Art,
as John Perreault (among other post-modern commentators) has observed,
does not necessarily progress; it simply proceeds. By that dint,
artists are at liberty to re-explore modes and methods whose time
has supposedly passed - not just antique styles revived for modern
times, but modern and pre-modern styles supposedly consigned to
history, no matter how recently. In this interpretation of post-modernism
- which we see in the late buildings of Phillip Johnson, hear in
the jazz-licked music of William Bolcom and John Harbison, and witness
in the old- and modern-master-quoting canvases of George Deem, Richard
Pettibone, and Mike Bidlo - any and all aspects of art history are
up for grabs.
The difference is that, while dyed-in-the-wool post-modernists appropriate
their historical references as citations, excerpts or approximations
- that is, with conceptual quotation marks around them - Nechita
delves into now-historic styles for the sheer energy and pleasure
they afford practitioner and viewer alike. She is inspired by the
rough facets of Picasso's Cubism and the sprightly abstraction of
Kandinsky, by the passionate figuration of expressionist painters
such as Van Gogh and Rouault, by Dali's and Miro's impossible distortions
of the human form. Nechita is not a "modernist," she is
a Modernist. She believes in modernism for its own sake. That is,
she believes in modernist practice for its own sake (not least because
she discovered it in herself long before she saw the work of other
modernists); the ideology of modernism does not inspire her, at
least at present. (Indeed, as she grows in sophistication and addresses
herself more to artistic theory, she may have emendations of her
own to make to modernist ideology.) You can call Nechita a neo-modernist
of a sort, growing not out of modernist (and, for that matter post-modernist)
theory but towards it.
Nechita's allegiance to (neo-) modernist practice serves her well,
as it requires of her a facility with paint in place of a non- (even
anti-) modernist facility with rendering (or, for that matter, a
post-modernist facility with words and/or the camera). As supple
as is her line, as fluid as is her brush, as modulated as her palette
might be (even in paintings whose colors seem to have issued right
from the tube), Nechita does not display the ability, much less
the desire, to paint or draw a picture that mirrors reality. She
may in fact command such ability innately, but she does not need,
or want, to. (When sent to a traditional art academy she lasted
all of three weeks.)
What Nechita commands instead is a far more idiosyncratic grasp
of what to modern (and neo-modern) eyes constitutes pictorial cohesion,
and commands as well the optical and manual ability to realize this
cohesion.
All of her work goes into the production of something more than
an image: what is produced is an image issuing from both the mind
of the artist and a physical encounter with the media employed,
whether those media are as rigid as lithography, as obdurate as
steel, or as responsive - yet tricky, even treacherous - as oil
on canvas. Like any true modernist, Nechita paints (or draws, sculpts,
or prints) her world for our delectation; she does not mirror ours
back at us. And like any good modernist, Nechita paints her world
with her evident skills modified to the task, so that her world,
no matter how peculiar or daunting it may seem, asks us in.
In this respect, Nechita is anything but a modernist ideologue.
While the strategies of modernism include challenging its viewers
and shocking otherwise complacent society, Nechita maintains a basically
benign relationship with her audience. Significantly, she is not
eager to please; her bumptious, often riotously distorted imagery
makes its way into pictorial (and, more recently, sculptural) form
without heed as to whom it may puzzle, put off, or even offend.
Like any good modernist, she gives concrete form to subjective impulse,
giving credence only to what she sees and feels within. But at the
same time Nechita is readily forthcoming with explanation of her
intentions, methods, and aspirations. In her many encounters with
the public she patiently recapitulates her stories and her aims,
and does so while maintaining an almost preternatural poise and
articulateness - which qualities themselves distance her from the
common construct of the artist (modernist and even post-modernist)
as a diffident, almost mute (or, conversely, incoherently garrulous)
Bohemian. And she is as unaffected in her narrative now as she was
when she first came to public attention six or so years ago.
Nechita's art has been compared here to that of the artists in the
COBRA group. More upbeat and even more eclectic than the work produced
around 1950 (and to varying degress since) by the surrealism- and
expressionism-influenced "angry young men" of COpenhagen,
BRussels, and Amsterdam, Nechita's art prompts even closer stylistic,
and spiritual, comparison with two other notable artists of the
20th century - one predating COBRA, one following it, obliquely
but knowingly.
Jean Cocteau was one of the great polymaths of the modernist era,
working in nearly every discipline, by himself or in collaboration
with others, from literature to music to dance. The art form that
seems to spring the most freely from Cocteau's mind and hand, thus
lying closest to Cocteau's soul, however, is pictorial: conjuring
figures and other images out of so many darting and meandering lines,
the apparitions Cocteau painted, sculpted, and above all drew have
a genial spontaneity to them, an unfettered immediacy that transcends,
even as it enlivens, the narratives, or even the illustrative tasks,
they bear. In this, and in their pan-modernist stylization (which
takes in symbolism, fauvism, cubism, futurism, and surrealism),
Cocteau's visual artwork prefigures Nechita's.
So does that of a less likely predecessor, the "angry young
man" of New York's mean streets: Jean Michel Basquiat. A gifted
near-autodidact like Nechita, Basquiat's line-driven neo-expressionist
imagery did not emerge from an unsophisticated world, or even art-world,
view. But he did allow himself an approach that was almost diaristic,
and certainly stream-of-consciousness and quasi-surrealist in its
emulation of "automatic writing". From Basquiat's hands
images and words flowed with equal abandon - and, as it happened,
with equal formal rigor - onto canvas and paper. Nechita's imagery
may (at least at this point) be less urbane, elaborate, and foreboding
than Basquiat's, but it maintains the same volubility and what you
might call stylized impulse. That is, in both Basquiat's case and
Nechita's the urge to give form to a thought or a feeling takes
shape in a manner deliberately, if effortlessly, consistent with
the artist's style. You can tell a Basquiat from a mile away; by
such a yardstick, Nechita's can be told from, oh, about a thousand
feet. This year.
In one aspect, however, Nechita is very, very different than Cocteau
or Basquiat. She is not a writer. Cocteau, best known for his writing,
infused even the simplest of his drawings with a literary aura,
not to mention a telling melancholy; and it is not hard to tell
in the decorous trails his pen or pencil left on paper that his
is the contemplative line of the storyteller, as well as the elegant
line of the calligrapher. The calligraphic gesture also informs
Basquiat's work, and the written word recurs insistently therein,
to the point where his works on paper, and even paintings, can start
to seem like notebook or diary entries. Nechita may exercise a sure
and lively line, but it is the line of a picturemaker, not that
of a writer. She may have a calligrapher's touch, and she certainly
loves line for its own sake, not just as an armature for color and
composition; but Nechita's images are not notations, they are apparitions.
Nechita has been consistent in her
style from the outset of her career. Like all artists, she experiments;
like all good artists, she takes her experiments seriously; like
all serious artists, she carefully considers the outcome of each
experiment and evaluates it in terms of its applicability to her
vision. Even more than her style, Nechita's vision has remained
consistent from the beginning. Ironically, however, it could ultimately
be her vision rather than her style that mutates the most dramatically
- or seems to.
Nechita's outlook is a humanist one. It is one that, typical to
modernism, conflates the personal and the universal, valorizing
the individual point of view but sharing it with the world. She
has a sense of mission, but her sense of the world is hopeful. Her
vision follows suit, tempering a risible - you might say, in the
best sense of the word, grotesque - regard for the figure with wit,
affection and verve. As she evolves Nechita is unlikely to lose
her humanist bent; and her sense of mission and of hope, clearly
not fragile, is not going to be easily compromised. How she manifests
these basic sentiments, however - how she continues to measure humanity
against her aspirations for it, and how she regards the fate of
this peculiar planet - will evolve in response to exterior as well
as interior events. In otherwords, clouds can come between Nechita
and her sun - that is, between her sunny nature and her comprehension
of life and art. She may have reason at some point in her career
to modify her vision, so that the grotesque may overtake the affection
(although the wit and verve are unlikely to diminish).
But any artistic temperament reserves for itself such changes in
weather, or (less likely, but not impossible), a change in climate.
And the temperament of a child, and especially that of an adolescent,
hangs likewise in the balance. But, then, the astounding maturity
Nechita displays, in the execution of both her art and her public
role as artist - a maturity that should be the envy of artists (and
many others) twice, three times her age - gives reassuring indication
that her interior artistic climate is stable and durable.
Does this mean that Nechita, in her contentment, will simply be
churning out "Nechitas" for the rest of her life? Not
likely. As an important part of her evident maturity, Nechita evinces
a groundedness, a lack of defensiveness, and a quick and hungry
intellect, all necessary ingredients for meaningful artistic growth.
As part of her love for the world, she remains open to its multifarious
influence - and remains similarly open to the many models afforded
by art. Nechita's style, and the vision that drives it, will perforce
evolve. And equally, it will always be her style. It will always
show traces of her current manner, the totemic, figure-centered
cubo-expressionism that has seemed to come so effortlessly from
her mind and hand but which she has actually worked hard to perfect.
(She is famous for spending long hours in her studio.
She may love every minute spent there, but what she loves about
her studio time is the ongoing struggle she must engage in to match
vision to material, to master her media while riding her vision.)
If Nechita's style can be described as "totemic" and "figure-centered",
note should be made of its compositional complexity, a complexity
that has increased in recent works (notably the lithographic series).
This complexity, evolving naturally out of Nechita's ongoing reconsideration
of cubism, brings about a fusion, or at least elision, of the figure
with (or into) its surroundings. One of the revolutionary achievements
of cubism in pictorial terms was the dissolution it effected of
boundaries between figure and ground; as object (figure or still
life) and space (landscape) were now all rendered with the same
interplay of facets, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish
one play of facets from another. The resulting visual and subjective
ambiguity has been one of the most challenging aspects of cubism
from its inception. The vivacity of Nechita's images can divert
us from this aspect of her work, but sooner or later we note, with
some unease and with deepening engagement, her conflation of figure
and ground.
This aspect of Picasso's cubism seems to be one of the few Nechita
is carrying over into her newest work. Instead, the playful anxiousness
of Miro's abstract surrealism and the anxious playfulness of COBRA
are coming more and more to undergird Nechita's vision. She is marrying
cubist formal ambiguity to the others' ambiguity of spirit. The
ambiguous nature of her pictures thus redoubles - but does not overwhelm
the insouciance that is still at the core of her vision. Even in
its burgeoning ambiguity, the increasingly worldly uncertainty that
betrays Nechita's entrance into adolescence, the work remains exuberant.
It is actually getting funnier; a mark of her maturity is the increasing
command Nechita is taking of her own wit. The figural distortions
seem more and more pointed, their facial grotesqueries more masklike
and comical, their bodily attenuations less childlike and more slapstick.
Gradually purging her work of childhood's crude stylizations, Nechita
would seem to be turning instead to the more various, and certainly
more controlled, visual universe of the comic strip and cartoon.
It is not hard to imagine Nechita's people - or, if you would, peoploids
- dancing onscreen, in movie theaters, on television sets, or even
on computer monitors. Their strong but not overemphasized linear
armatures and their equally powerful intimations of motion set them
up for kinetic reinterpretation. But they would be awfully unorthodox
cartoon characters, as they seem to spend a lot more time changing
appearances and identities than in doing anything - anything, that
is, on which animated film could impose its inevitable demand for
a story. Maybe it will be enough that Nechita's spry, jocular quasi-humans
simply dance before our eyes much as they seem to now; maybe animated
film will broaden and mature in its possibilities so that popular
animation will no longer have to have a story line - or, for that
matter, a beginning, a middle, or an end. In that way, animation
will return to its roots, will accept and incorporate digital descendants
such as screen savers, and, finally, embrace visual art as a sister
discipline and a dynamic presence of equal force and allure. Certainly,
Alexandra Nechita's visual art commands such force, and exercises
such allure over an audience that overlaps, or should. You might
call Nechita's work the thinking girl's Fantasia. It is definitely
the thinking girl's neo-modernism.
Los Angeles
November 2000
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