|
|
 |
|
|
Francisca Sutil
Author: Maria Elvira Iriarte
ArtNexus No. 68 - Dec 2007
|  | Last year, the exhibition “Alquimia: 25 Años de Pintura” paid tribute to an artist of unfailing dedication and tenacity and offered viewers an exceptional opportunity to follow a visual path marked by great beauty. This exhibition of works by Francisca Sutil (born 1952, Santiago) was held at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes as part of its “Contemporary Chilean Artists” series. An outstanding book was also published: profusely illustrated, it includes a preface by the museum director Milan Ivelic as well as texts by eight critics (one of them Chilean) and by Sutil herself, the latter titled On Crafts and the Path. Several pages are devoted to the artist’s biography and others to an extensive bibliography. .
Hailed today as a master of color, Francisca Sutil studied engraving and printmaking at the Pontificia Universidad Católica’s art school in the early 1970s. At that time, she experimented with unconventional printmaking techniques, such as a combination of oil-based xylography and silkscreen. Her work referred to the evolution and manifestation of human spiritual life. This conceptual framework has sustained her entire career; one cannot understand Sutil’s oeuvre without attention to that referent. Sutil’s art implies a profound consideration of humankind’s ultimate reason for being, of humankind’s very ontology. .
In 1972, Sutil enrolled with a scholarship at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. There, she honed her mastery of printmaking techniques and her command of the English language, which she learned “by ear and to survive,” as the artist said. After six months in Dallas, she spent another half-year traveling from museum to museum, from gallery to gallery, driven by the hunger to encounter art, either historical or contemporary. Sutil traveled like a student, with scant resources but with firm determination in the pursuit of her goal. Afterward, she returned to Universidad Católica. From this second period in her education, she gratefully and fondly remembers Eduardo Vilches’s color class, feelings that are shared by several generations of the renowned printmaker’s students.
As a printmaker, and spurred by some works by the Colombian artist Omar Rayos, Sutil became interested in the depth of relief. The limited availability of printmaking paper in Chile in the 1970s prompted her to research techniques of handcrafted paper, an activity that absorbed her for years. When it comes to artistic technique, Sutil is restless. She is never satisfied with what she already knows; instead, she researches, reformulates, and invents with admirable discipline and rigor.
In 1977, Sutil moved to New York City. Her seventeen-year stay helped to complete her education1, solidify the earliest stages of her career, familiarize her with the period’s avant-garde, and develop her interest in the manufacturing and dyeing of paper. Color appeared early in her work, initially through the tones and hues of the fibers of handmade paper and later with dyed pulp. With characteristic seriousness, and supported by an OAS fellowship, Sutil researched stable pigments for paper pulp. She had the support of Henry Levinson, the inventor of acrylic colors for artists, and was able to get singular results beginning with her series Volcanoes, Waves, and Aereal Views (1981–82). In these works, her unusually shaped handmade paper2 vibrated with color; properly speaking, these works were no longer prints: they seemed to distance themselves from the category and find their place between painting and sculpture. Sutil said, “After three years in New York, I started seeing Chile from afar and the U.S. from up close.”3 This comment enlightens works that evoked Chilean geography as a distant referent, expressed in a fully cosmopolitan language that was already entirely abstract. .
Sutil broke from regular formats with the series Forces (1983–84). These works were more than derivatives of the shaped canvases so common during the period, as popularized by artists like Frank Stella: the colorful papers possessed a sculptural quality. Each carefully calculated shape-color contributed to dynamic and disruptive compositions. The colors were flat. Sutil said that she sees in “successive planes,” like a stage designer in the traditional stage arts. This was evident in the series Abstractions (1985-–86). .
“Over time, the characteristic way in which paper produces opaque and flat colors—which is also its greatest quality—came to seem too limited,”4 said Sutil. The artist’s interest in depth, in space, was resolved not through traditional chiaroscuro. Sutil decided to obliterate the canvas support, relying instead on a coating of calcium carbonate, zinc oxide, and animal glue that followed formulas by fifteenth-century masters. This gesso was not just a support; it was an active, constitutive part of the work, with its own characteristics. It offered a smooth surface that amplified the applied color without repressing it. Sutil knew that the old Flemish masters worked with oil paints on gessoed canvases. But she went a step further: she added pigment to the gesso, so that color and support became integrated. She has followed this principle in her work for twenty years, painting with oil and finishing with a layer that emphasizes depth. .
By 1989, Sutil had acquired full mastery of her technique, which demanded tremendous self-assurance, energy, and quickness in the various gestures: applying the gesso with a flat spatula and working the paint with sweeping brushstrokes that left no room for correction. Thus, Sutil’s oil painting resembled the decisiveness of a watercolor or a fresco. Each trace was unique and irreversible. Her compositions jettisoned internal form and limited themselves to the format, which had returned to being regular. The chromatic surfaces—which alluded to the concept of all-over painting—were sometimes composed in diptychs. Complex plots of color, rich with textures and suggestions of depth, were generated by the application of several layers of oil on the pigmented gesso. The series Voices of Silence (1991–92), first exhibited at New York’s Nohra Haime Gallery, was from this period. Alongside vertical, horizontal, or diagonal grids, there were works with concentric loci and expansive movement: these alluded to the cosmos and its mysterious activity. Sometimes, Sutil’s colors became infinitely delicate and indescribable. They were at once frontal and deep, static and dynamic. The title of the series guided the viewer to the contemplative state that is required for the works’ appreciation. .
In the series Celebrations, from 1993–94, the artist incorporated small wax circles that broke the gesso’s grids, accentuating depth and movement and “perhaps, a certain perceptual bewilderment.”5 In 1995, these dots, now somewhat enlarged, were painted in oil; the surface vibrated and gained a restraint, a centripetal movement that curbed the previous period’s “spills.” The compositional shift was important: Sutil moved from expansiveness to concentration, from surface to depth, and the latter was expressed in a powerful and clear way. .
A few barely legible lines emerged in the Celebrations, until they overtook the compositional theme. In her most familiar works today are vertical chromatic bands, which Sutil has used since her 1998–99 series Spaces. In these works, there was a semantic play between the title and the seemingly flat paintings. An extremely subtle handling of color generated space in each work. Synthesizing the lessons taught by Albers and Kandinsky, Sutil created space on her pigmented gessoes solely by handling color, without concessions to a perspective effect. Her color acquired a magical quality and a significance that stubbornly escaped verbal description. This recalled the experiments of artists in search of pure and resonant color, like Carlos Cruz Díez’s Chromocynetic Situations. Francisca Sutil’s achievement was to make works with profound emotional meaning. The colors communicated emotions, feelings, and inner resonances, not just visual effects. The viewer moved from the optical to the conceptual, by way of the emotional. None of the works by American minimalists, a group that critics sometimes associated with the Chilean Sutil6, came close to such results, with the exception of Agnes Martin. .
The series Spaces included works in other materials, with paper or linen supports: watercolor, oil, and turpentine essence. The pictorial gesture remained the same: an energetic sweep that generated the color band in a single movement. Colors seemed to float in the visual field, creating a space, not a plane, with minimal resources. Using an infinitely subtle chromatic array, the painter captured her inner vibration, her passionate search for the transcendent. The viewer was awed by the exact gesture that never belied its handcrafted origin. The vertical bands possessed the exquisite calligraphy of an ancient, Eastern writing system. .
The Capilla Cruz, a commission Sutil worked on between 1999 and 2001, was the culmination of these achievements. This small private prayer room was built by the architect Carlos Alberto Cruz. Superimposed on the hexagonal plan was a four-sided volume, over ten meters tall, with a central skylight. On each wall, two and one half meters above floor level, Sutil installed three paintings7, generating a frieze interrupted only by the tower’s angular light shafts. The theme of these twelve paintings is a representation of the Catholic Church’s liturgical year. The artist researched the topic in depth for six months, guided by eminent tutors like Father Joaquín Allende Luco, as well as the text The Lithurgic Year at Odo Casel, a study of the German Benedictine theologian published by the Universidad Católica. To the symbolic colors used by the Church, Sutil added her own sensibility, emphasizing the main stations of the liturgical year from Advent to Pentecost. Events like Resurrection and Nativity were evoked in white and gold, ancient symbols of the deity; the Passion and Death of Christ were represented in red, crimson, and deep purple. Green, the Catholic liturgy’s most common color, was concentrated in a handful of zones. Through Sutil’s painting, a small space became an area for contrition and meditation. A carefully kept box archived the work’s progress, from the earliest sketches through the final color proofs. This project was the foundation of a large part of Sutil’s later developments and demonstrated her organization and discipline. .
Transmutations, created between 2001 and 2003, were “inspired by a specific topic: the passage from life to death,” said Sutil. Deeply moved by the passing of someone very dear and by the attack on the World Trade Center, Sutil approached the theme of the transitory existence of human beings. In this work, the technique of pigmented gesso and oil, besides watercolors, noticeably intensified the colors; space became denser. Several color arrangements created veritable symphonies. The dark hues—violet, purple, deep blue, black—vibrated as much as the yellows and ochres. It is deeply rooted in the Western tradition to represent death with dark tones; in several Eastern cultures, mourning is represented by the non-color, white. Sutil sees the matter of death as part of a cycle of life. .
Sutil’s most recent series, Resonances and Passages, appear as implicit developments from the preceding works. Several works in these series have unusual dimensions, like 0.80 x 4.00 meters. They invite the viewer to follow a given path, a trajectory, in order to display the entirety of their music-like range. Besides connotations of a musical scale, the concept of time is more evident in these works. This means the time required from the viewer, which Sutil engages with syncopated and surprising patterns, as well as the time that is read in the symbolic colors: from birth to death, or transit. Sutil’s large bands of vibrant colors, handled with unsurpassed mastery, are the expression of an artist who has achieved her goals in full: color becomes a vehicle for the ineffable. .
.
NOTES.
1. 1977, Parsons School of Design. 1978, Whitney Museum of Art Seminar. 1981, M.F.A., Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, N.Y.
2. Approx. 2 m. x 2 m, made in a special table commissioned by the artist to an artisan in California.
3. F. Sutil, Alquimia, p. 163.
4. Idem, p. 165
5. Idem, p. 167
6. Since 1984, the Chilean artists has regularly exhibited at the New York Gallery Nohra Haime. Her work has been profusely an object of comment.
7. Each frame is 1,00 x 1,00 x 0,10 m. |  |
| |
|
 |
|
|
|
