MARIELIS SEYLER:
STILLNESS AND TRANSFORMATION: OR, THE ANCIENT ART OF EMPATHEIA

Photographic portraits in which a wrinkled cabbage leaf seemingly obfuscates a face or an actual (collaged) tiny escargot shell precludes a head. Photographs of various dead animals - birds, fish, rabbits (subtly referencing Joseph Beuys's hare) - in which various substances - tea, blood, rust, wood shavings, earth, candle soot, wax and herbs - are physically rubbed into the surface of the paper, almost like a liniment, to mitigate their stillness. Portraits of people sleeping in which similar substances, as well as the more traditional media of watercolour and crayon, function alternately to veil and lucidify the nightmare and dream of mortality. These are the subjects of Marielis Seyler's 'portraits'(the photographs of which are always executed by the artist and mounted on canvas), and the actions which produce a soothing or healing effect, and ultimately, a transformed 'object' - a seemingly animate or awakened 'still life' - free of any sentimental attachments or easy distanciations.

The heart-felt empathy of the artist motivates the middle-states of being she manages to locate or achieve, despite the incursion (if not the onslaught) of all our most cursory existential conclusions. Road kill, the catch-of-the-day, death by natural causes, disasters and the normative processes of life occasion transformation rather than merely embody terminal end-points. In Seyler's work, the stillness of these end-points, their terminal ecstasy, is rendered 'real' rather than 'realistic' through a process of transformation that is both symbolic and material, according to which the difficult opacities and transparencies of life are communicated not only as part of Nature but also as part of the transformative process of art itself. Sublimation and de-sublimation - the Sleep of culture and its Spectacles - vie not for the still-born attention of consciousness at the end of the decade, century and millennium (the triumvirate and triumphancy of Revelations) but for our affection, our passion, our understanding, for our sense of a collective fate, or what the ancient Greeks called empatheia.

In Seyler's work, a fleeting emotion is rendered sensate and enduring, and yet ungraspable; a photograph becomes a sort of painting, and this 'painting' becomes a phenomenological and critical trace with all of its attendant diverse physical properties. This 'unpainting' or 'unphotograph' (sic) is transformed (again), through this gentle wash of additions or projections, into an arresting but 'moving' image. That is, it is an image that moves us emotionally, but one which has even less to do with our contemporary cinematic experiences (our 'motion pictures') than with painting per se, and everything to do with providing us with a motive that can somehow encompass the 'picture' (in a Wittgensteinian sense), the objective dross, of a senseless but unforgiving emotion.

Great or little suffering can be communicated only through the great or little empathy of the process itself. Attraction and repulsion, as we all know, play into each other's hands. Only those stillnesses which subsist in harmony with the consummate agency of transformation can generate a consciousness that will forgive our images, and, more significantly, images that will forgive our lacks of consciousness. Seyler's photo-paintings portray these lacks and forgiveness, this unspeakable empathy, with unswerving expressions of brutality and faith.

II

Although Seyler uses photography and various processes and mixed-media to intervene upon the photographs, she is definitively not a media or picture-theory artist. Gerhard Richter and Cindy Sherman have less to do with this work than, let us say, Beuys or Tàpies.

In this new body of work, Correlations, Seyler uses photo-emulsion sometimes on brown wrapping paper and sometimes on various transparent papers to modulate the physical effects of the photographic process - either to make images stronger or more concrete or more fragile or less impenetrable. Sometimes the paper is crumpled or actually torn; oftentimes wax and herbs, tea or coffee, or leaves are applied or attached to the surface or are photographed 'environmentally' as an endemic part of the subject; and, at other times, the photograph is coated with bronze dust, not merely lending it the appearance of antiquity but actually weighing or pulling it down closer to the earthly tones of mortality. Whether the subject is sleeping and wrapped with cellophane, effecting almost a ghost-like spectre; or whether the subject is staring directly at the viewer, with darkening leaves 'grounding' the photograph from inside or bronze dust physically inflecting the figure and reticulating the fugitive surface of the picture from the outside, Seyler is always trying to instill in us the full impact of what it means to be alive momentarily, from moment to moment, and dead the very next moment. Nothing can mediate this physical reality, nothing can make it go away or make it more present, except the transformations that paradoxically make it both more invisible and less visible and thus more real.

In Seyler's work, the process of mediation is not replaced but made more complex by virtue of being (itself) the subject of a transformation. Mediation is, in this artist's hands, transformed not so much into ritual acts of medication - although there is nothing inherently wrong with this - but into a metaphysical healing process with very down-to-earth implications.

Most of the subjects in the photographs are comprised of people that the artist personally knows, either as friends or relatives. While this 'distance' - or the 'connection' between the artist and her subject - is unmediated by the collective, it does not mitigate against the values invoked in behalf of the universal. On the contrary, the values of Subjectivity and Nature converge in Seyler's work to create a desolate, inconsolable feeling of love, distributed equally over the facts of human existence and the transcendental essence of humanity.

In picture after picture of people she knows, we are struck by her sense of resolved dialectics between the facticity of the subject's expression and the expressive materiality of the photograph's so-called 'transcendental' circumstance. What, then, are we to make of the girl with tea spilled over her unperturbed face? What about the girl with her fingers dramatically stuffed into her mouth and herbs stuck to the surface of her image but who remains nonplussed? And what of the photographs of the older woman bending over and tending to her younger adopted child? The simplicity effects a language of atonement that defies our best hermeneutic acts, especially when they must confront the inherent, poignant mystery of the facts as they surround - literally circumscribe - us with nothing more than themselves.

What about the photograph of Victoria Chaplin (one of Charlie Chaplin's daughters) and Jean-Baptiste Thierrée, the well-known French actor, holding a rabbit, with nothing but leaves in the background? What mysteries do their solemn gazes contain, which the artist does not seem eager to exploit and the subjects do not seem to want to conceal or reveal? Why the rabbit? Passive accident or active symbol of a living still life? Signifier for the wilderness of rebirth, the manic wildness of love, or the wild unconsciousness of facts proliferating in the brush of mere contingency?

And finally, what do we make of the rather melodramatic photographs of the artist's mother (La Mère), wrapped in cellophane like a mummy, the surface of which is additionally covered with butterflies and herbs? Premonition or momento mori configuring the grotesque, baroque transformations exercised by Nature, by the natural process of life, by the mortality of living from moment to moment transcendently?

Whether the artist is trying to literally contain and represent, or, let us say, even 'renaturalize' somehow the still life of a dead animal or the stillness of a vast expanse of fallen trees and branches or the untouched blue stillness of a sleeping child, or whether she is attempting to objectify the correlations between herself and her subjects and all the feelings attendant upon such an exchange, the artist never fails to remain true to all that can (or cannot) be contained by the smallest expression of acceptance and amelioration.

All suffering - whether human or inhuman - encapsulated by the obliterated face, the closed eyes or grimace on the face of a sleeping child, or by the negligibility of a crushed sea shell in the sands of time, or some split tea or coffee on the cuff or sleeve (the 'canvas', as it were) of a stranger espied from the furthest corner of the universe, or the imperceptible tilt of a statue's arm lost in an obscure garden in Paris, is swept away by the artist's unfailing sense of temporal equanimity.

They - these traces, these signs, these bits of bronze and wax and sand, these gestures, these leaves, these images - are neither forgotten nor remembered in these photographs. They are simply related - co-related, if you will - to our experiences as human and inhuman beings. The differentiation as an enormous ethical matter withdraws, here, into the aesthetics of a piece of brown wrapping paper that contains no gift other than that of time itself.

Richard Milazzo, New York, 1997