Katie van Scherpenberg: o corpo da obra

Losing Sight of All but the Body: Illuminations on K.V.S.

Fernanda Morse

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The artist Katie Van Scherpenberg never left childhood: she examines materials like a child discovering touch; relates elements like a child looking for magic, imagining themself an alchemist or scientist among test tubes and reagents.

The images that sprout from her canvases are like those we see with our eyes closed. Outlines, traces of form that fix in the memory. Like the path of some unknown animal. Like a flash of a landscape.

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The line is the pretext for examining the passage of time — and the material is its witness. During this passage, it is the image that forms and deforms that establishes the flow of life in Katie Van Scherpenberg’s work.

The degeneration of material proves itself as important as the material itself. But remember: it is not the work that degenerates — it presents and represents degradation, blemishes, oxidation.

When it degenerates, that is, when it loses its original qualities, matter does not die, but rather generates something else — there is genesis in what degenerates.

The English art historian Dawn Adès comes to mind, commenting on the work Duna [Dune] (1992), from the series Mamãe prometo ser feliz [Mummy I Promise to be Happy]:

Dune resists reproduction. This is true, of course, of many contemporary artworks, but not necessarily for similar reasons. Dune’s materials change over time, so the work can never be definitively captured. (...) The last time I saw Dune, the surface had started to turn pink and the stitching of the sheets and the shell patterns were more prominent. Eventually, it seems, the surface will turn quite dark. In how long, who knows?[1]

Although she works with the imponderable, with what she has no control over, Scherpenberg’s technical knowledge of the materials allows her to calculate her roll of the dice. The darkening canvas that Adès observes is not a mistake but rather conveys an intention.

Katie has many dark works, results of layers of matter and pigment combined with the action of time. In a text written by Marília Martins in 1992 for the Jornal do Brasil, we learn the place of black in her work:

It is as though Katie inverts the rules of light. For those who imagine in white a mix of all shades and in black the absolute absence of color and light, Katie’s work is based on the opposite. “In painting, black is the mixture and white is the absence,” says Katie. In her works, she finds black by overlaying different shades of different colors. And refuses so-called “academic black,” which claims to be the absence of color.^[2]

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Once she understood that her body was indispensable for the investigations she wanted to embark onand the processes she needed to trigger, the artist entered the scene. Katie’s interventions in the landscape and their photographic and filmed records, which place her work in the realms of land art and performance, are still born from the way she thinks about painting. The focus is not her figure or the experience of her own body, the focus is the consequence of her action — the action is the work.

The exchange between the body of the artist and the body of the work is, as such, what animates — gives life to — her production. As the artist and curator Alberto Saraiva says, Katie seeks to “establish a new physiology of painting”.^[3]

In large part captured in photo or video performances, her ephemeral actions involve interventions with iron oxide on the landscape. In Menarca [Menarche](2000), the red pigment flows into the sea, spreading out around the artist’s body, referring, starting with the work’s title, to the first menstrual experience. In Landscape painting (2004), meanwhile, Scherpenberg returns to the Amazon, a place so important in her life, and there, on the banks of the River Negro, she paints tree leaves and disperses iron oxide in the water, temporarily transforming the landscape into a dreamlike vision.

The red of the pigment, which she has used in many works, references, according to the artist, “the reddish pigment left by the Amazon River after the passing of the pororocas.”^[4]

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Scherpenberg's blood red might even make us think of works by other women artists, like the Cuban Ana Mendieta (1948-1985). The fundamentals of their research, however, come from different places. While Scherpenberg uses the body to examine painting, Mendieta uses art to examine the limits and politics of the body. This is why one represents blood (K.V.S. with iron oxide) and the other uses blood (Mendieta in works like Body Tracks [1974]).

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A similar distinction can be drawn between Andy Warhol’s (1928-1987) Piss Paintings (or Oxidation Paintings, 1977-78) and the oxidations induced by Katie in many works. In Warhol’s case, the profanity of the act of urinating on the canvas is an essential element in the work. In Scherpenberg, meanwhile, scatology is far from being the focus. Although she has also used urine, among other reagents, to explore chemical interactions in painting, the way these reactions were provoked does not constitute the concept of the work. The opposite is true of Warhol: the happenings in his studio, when people were invited to urinate on the canvases, are a fundamental part of the narrative of these works.

Katie does not seek to profane the history of painting but rather construct, superimpose layers of intervention on the canvas. Or, going further, each of her works could be considered “a catastrophe in observation,”^[5] as the artist herself once said about Jardim vermelho [Red Garden] (1986).

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Katie Van Scherpenberg works with the essence of technique, of technè, production that engages knowledge — both in the sense that the activity demands prior understanding, and in the sense that the action discovers, discloses, a truth.

In an interview for the opening of a 1986 exhibition, Scherbenberg declared: “There is nothing new here, not even anything novel. Only an attempt to perceive what I didn’t know I knew.”

This perspective aligns with a comment curator Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro made on K.V.S’s production: “Van Scherbenberg’s work embraces the unknown in a physical dialog between the pigments, her environment, the artist’s intention, the surrounding environment, and the viewer’s own physical and emotional conscience.”^[6]

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Scherpenberg professes a preference for tempera and encaustic, claiming them to be the oldest painting techniques known to man.

Above all, what seems to fascinate her is “The importance of matter in forming the image.”^[7]

The image, in turn, is what emerges from the encounter between tangible matter and the matter of thought:

“If I know my material well and if, obviously, I am interested in questions other than painting, I mean, poetry, music, human beings in general, everything around us, it is clear that the image will appear, I don’t need to keep looking.”^[8]

The painting is accomplished, as such, as a transmission of visible memories.^[9]

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K.V.S. also examines the picture as a format, both in her canvases and her spatial operations.

Two untitled works from 1987 illustrate a metalinguistic investigation. Black, red, grey, and ochre draw elementary forms, imprecise lines, grids, and circles that serve to outline, in essence, the scene: a painting within a painting.

Later, it is a chassis structure that Scherbenberg uses to border her interventions with iron oxide on sand, grass, and the like, in actions like Passante [Passerby] (2002), Espaços ocupados [Occupied Spaces] (2003), and Encoding (2004). From this gesture, rectangular blocks of color emerge, ephemeral paintings, that with time are absorbed by the landscape: the passerby walks over them; the grass grows; the water washes away. The impermanence of the material in the space contrasts with the solidity of the red pigment, once it has been deposited. There is still a tension between substance and erasure at play here.

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K.V.S.’s encaustics, meanwhile, result from happy accidents. The formless form of wax that melts and sets gives the canvas its relief and depth.

A sense of mystery is created by this sort of solid veil that settles on the surface. We are at the limit between opacity and legibility.

Behind, the fingerprints — dots in the backdrop, at once repeated and unique.

The formless matter that produces the image is matter informed by the world.

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Katie van Scherpenberg shares her passion for matter with time. Without getting into a dispute, she prepares the piece, and passes it on. Time kisses it, finishing the job.

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The enigma K.V.S. elaborates is not unravelled. What is interesting is the tense arc it traces, connecting our body, her body, and the body of the work.

In one, final illumination, I think of K.V.S. as inviting us to an esthetic experience as an invisible thread of visceral connection.

Like what Ana Cristina Cesar experiences in a poem, as read in her book Cenas de abril [April Scenes] (1979):

I look a long time at the body of a poem
until I lose sight of all but the body
feel it separate between my teeth
a trickle of blood on the gums^[10]