 | A Glance at the Environment Bernardita Vattier (1944) has developed since the 80´s an eclectic work, with no attachments to any discipline. Her works show several lines of investigation and a countless quantity of technical and formal solutions, that nevertheless, have something in common: The seek for visual textures, patterns and series of notorious formal accents, a game of rhythms and tensions that give in its limits to the poetic sensibility. In 1984 and 1985 we saw how her critical look scrutinizes the city figuring out its signs and symbols, landmarks that revealed the inner pulse of a space inhabited by forms, sounds, lights and dangerously domesticated and nullified subjects. Vattier looked at the city with a tedious attention to its damages, and then displayed her personal look though pictorial, literary and political exercises, in mixed techniques, heliography, lights and geometric rhythms that configured a single restoration of the urban semiotic. “Man is a prisoner of architecture —she said—. I have no solution, but this is my scream”.1 She needs to externalize and give a social and humanist message has allowed her to develop a versatile work, of permanent formal changes, structured from specific situations and places. “The object of her concerns — says Margarita Schultz— is the human person, its worrying personal position on the urban context. The city and its inhabitants, and the relations between them are their fertile ground where Vattier plants her critical seeds.2 Doubtless, something in her original training as Theatrical Designer is the basement of her expressive freedom: In Rio de Janeiro’s Visual Arts School, where I studied Theatrical Design, I learnt to use poor materials. I work better with them, than with the so called noble ones, because with them I have communicational problems. The distance between the stick of the brush and the canvas hardens me. The hair brush bothers me and that’s why I use the old fashioned, hard haired wall brush.3
Parallel to her main worries oriented to the man/city relationship, Vattier developed a series of works as a consequence of her readings of Borges. Especially from the poem “Butchershop” merge a kind of iconographic fuge, where the natural is opposed to artifice: Meaner than a brothel
The butchershop stands out as an insult to the street.
Above the door
A sightless cow’s head
presides the Witches' Sabbath
of cheap meat and final marbles
with the aloof majesty of an idol.
The rural presence, a great national topic came under the image of a cow in various plastic forms, which go from graphics to painting and volume. This was a recurrent motif in a stage of her work, when she filled various surfaces of the city with animals “marauding the boulevard”. An outstanding object in this series was the Cow-Seat, from 1986, that combines utility, design and contemporary art. In 1987 she carried out the assembly of faceless “characters” or “clothes” in a trolley bus, named Chapter III – Artícle 19 – N° 8. Next year, the show Brumo Abrumador recaptured the great theme of man and his conflicts and as if it where “cattle”, a group of anonymous figures invaded theatrically the space of the Las Condes Cultural Center. The black and white of the cattle was her motif that grew so as to be autonomous and stroll around forms invading the space. In fact, the analogy with the snow and the Andean ranges established a direct relation, which was presented during the 1989 São Paulo’s XX Biennial.4 In 1992, the show Antaño y Hogaño, presented in the same institute, imagined the tension between the urban spaces of our pre columbine past and what we see in present day cities built upon those same territories. She shows the same restlessness in the Contemporary Museum in 1994, in the exhibition Un marco por la Tierra, a direct ecological and activist statement where Vattier presented Hekatómbe, an installation with pictorial and graphics, and also collected objects. Bernardita Vattier´s work has been, for over two decades, a complain or denounce at the dehumanization and urban chaos. She achieves moments of profound inflection between the image of the cow as a natural symbol of passivity, and the violent semantics established from a recollection and installation of cow skulls at the São Paulo´s Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996. Later at the end of the 90´s, Vattier gave a thematic twist, that took her from the current look centred in sociological dimension, to another one more accurate and scientific, where her focus becomes a reflection upon the look, an inquiry that moves from art history to oftalmological science. ABOUT A GLANCE
In 2002, Vattier showed in the National Museum of Fine Arts Identical Identity, a series of works that penetrate visually aspects and territories of the human sight. In the fingerprints she establishes a territory that’s permeable to blow up: the fingerprint as a non written and specific topography. If identity is contained in the fingerprint, the eye is also a singularity, and that was what Vattier blew up the images to transform them into a spectacle. This exhibition, Observed Glance, structures it self from the visual possibilities offered by afflictions, mutations and visual accidents. Let us say that the work dialogues in tension with a treaty in blindness. The projects “vitreous humor” is the universe of chemical, physical and electrical luminosities, of failed spectrums, of non solved glitters and of spaces and indeterminate shapes that from the blurred vision of the one who loses or has lost sight becomes a clear observation amplified by the technological supports of oftalmologhy. But once we “see that, that sees us” as a result scanners, laser beams, resonances and electronic microscopes, Vattier translate the images and transform them in a place of plastics tests, whose origins are in art history itself, though in opposite’s sense. That is to say, that art history, from prehistory to impressionism, consists in an empirical and phenomenological analysis of vision and the way we see what we see, and we represent that what we see, Vattier observes “observations” recreates them. Its not a reflections about what we see, but, a recreation of the inside of the optical instrument turned model. Models merge from the technological observations and the artist recreates them, transforms them, translates them, intervenes them and amplifies through the various supports and techniques. Observed Glance establishes the direct relation between technology and ocular science, as if that same technology offers this orthopedics that allows seeing that which empirical vision does not elucidate. About this, Patricio M. Zárate comments
: At the moment the visual experimentation is favored by the new technologies that allow the digital transformation, conforming new forms of visibility created in computers and modified by different programs that enlarge the possibilities of invention and appreciation. The image reproduces as a simile of itself, in its different variations and possibilities, to become a cultural look where the different means that participate make use of her.5
The habitual thing is that the problems give the vision they constitute a closed environment, directly associated to patient and doctors. In principle, it is not an environment of aesthetic fruition neither of kantianic contemplation (“disinterested aesthetic appreciation"); just the opposite, all time that the topic appears in the life of the human beings, it owes himself fundamentally to the detected anomaly while we look at the sky spread in the grass, or when we are in the cinema and there are forms that don't belong to the projection, or when we look at of somebody’s face and we discover, grief-stricken, how its features disappear before our desire that retains nothing. It is that when a sensorial organ fails to comply its function, it arises under a terrifying aspect the void left by its absence. Room 1: “Looking at Miró”
Investigation performed with Bárbara Becker that consisted on a visual and bibliographical gathering of different eyes in the history of modern and contemporary art. This work can be appreciated in an eight minutes slideshow showing the complete work and an approach to the eyes of selected paintings, digitally photographed. This projection is accompanied by the series “Looking at Miró", composed by five canvases with acrylic that represent abstractions of the eye. Room 2: “Identical Identity II”
This is an installation with silk screen printings on the walls that show eyes from works of artists of universal art. These eyes, in turn, are reflected on mirrors placed in the opposite walls. Next to the above-mentioned, placed in the floor and hanging from the roof, eyes go from diverse paintings of Picasso; painted in synthetic enamel on resin spheres. These works, of great pictorial content, were carried out by sculptor Sergio Guzmán, invited artist to participate in this installation.6 Room 3: “Eye Disease”
These are a series of works in digital impression on polyester that will be placed in cabinets retro-illuminated. Accompanied by a five minutes video on an ocular laser surgery performed to the artist by Dr. Charlín in the year 2003, with whom she carried out works and observations on terrain in the Hospital Del Salvador. From those experiences came out works that recreate illnesses from the eye through different technologies of digital impression and acrylic on canvas. The floor in the same Room 3 presents a projection of optotypes used by the oculists to examine the visual capacity of the patient. These images of letters, numbers and signs of different size and thickness are used by Vattier in their aesthetic dimension, what doesn't prevent that their same presence faces us to the imminence of not being able to decipher them . . . From spectators we become thus ourselves (possible) patient. Observed Look is a tautology that takes the spectator to observe that that can be lost. But the artist -insistently – see light where the doctor sees fissures, deformations and perforations, threats of darkness and shadows. Insistently it puts the eye besieged by the observation here, removed, out of it", exposed, transformed into multiplied body, expanded, colored, pixelated, retro-illuminated, subject and object of a paradoxical show. Ramón Castillo
January, 2006
Bernardita Vattier, interviewed by María del Pilar Clemente, El Mercurio, june 29, 1985. Archive MNBA. Margarita Schultz, cat. Antaño y Hogaño, Sao Paulo’s Museum of Modern Art, Las Condes Cultural Center, april, 1992, s/p. Bernardita Vattier, interviewed in Ercilla Magazine no. 2672, october, 15, 1986. Archive MNBA. Other artists presents at the Biennial were Jorge Gaete, Humberto Nilo y Enrique Zamudio. Patricio M. Zárate, cat. Bernardita Vattier, Nacional Museum of Fine Arts. Santiago, 2002, s/p. Vattier following a collective and cooperative dimension has invited other artists to exhibit with her such as the sculpture Milton Lu and the visual artist Miguel Ángel Vidaurre.
| | 
|
