REUTERSWÄRD

Thresholds of beauty
Text by Gianluca Ranzi, Chief curator, Fondazione Mudima

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"What is the divine of nature? Not life alone, but unity and incomprehensibility, spirit, singularity. And this, in our judgment, is the domain of painting." This thought of Friedrich Schlegel opens to an idea of painting that requires not only practice and familiarity, but method. Method, as the Greek etymology goes, is a "path by which one goes beyond," just like painting that here it goes beyond the appearance of the world. Painting requires a process of slow and layered transformation: it is born in the present, from the artist's expressive need, it stages his deep-seated drives and it projects them into a timeless future, into the elsewhere that is proper to the work.
Method is thus the process of the work, the mental passage that in the artist takes place from inspiration to the elaboration of the form, because it should never be forgotten that, as Leonardo Da Vinci, whose name is so closely linked to the history of the Rivellino, stated: "painting is the highest mental discourse." On closer inspection, all art is a mental thing, even that which is most spur-of-the-moment and immediate, whether it be painting, sculpture, performance or poetry, insofar as it is the result of a choice and a method.
Olivia Reuterswärd's work, which embrace painting, poetry and performance, seems enlightened by a particular method: an in-between between senses and thought, an oblique, enveloping, surprising gaze that veils and at the same time reveals things, dreams and thoughts. This happens between the surfacing of light and the thickening of shadow: "the crossroads of light and shadow," as the artist writes in the vibrant and poetic text accompanying the exhibition. Painting then welcomes, transforms and generates a dreamlike forest animated by suspended, surfacing and pulsating images that coagulate on the surface like gems of a regenerated nature. The Swedish artist's painting becomes a bridge to the unexpressed, to that indeterminate mystery that still surrounds man and his actions, his being in the world.
A kind of dimming glow takes shape in her works producing an ever-changing intensity. Every emotion, every breath, every flower, every shadow, possesses its own necessity and autonomy, because it arises from the conscious and controlled exercise of painting, of a constant making that renews itself from picture to picture, as if it began each time from the absolute zero, as in a true creative act of birth and growth that is never equal to itself.
It is thus that magmatic nebulae, vibrant with movement and penumbra, become a connective and germinal ground of appearances: the mysterious fly of a butterfly that never touches the ground, the vestiges of a winter flower, the traces of stars or a delicate gust of wind, a snowflake coming to rest.  The artist’s work are pictorial surfaces that open to the fairy epiphany of a memory, a sensation, a state of mind. In successive pictorial layers, the painting reveals itself to be trembling, animated, responsive to light and humble at the same time, and the darkness, which here dialogues magically with light, never has the black colour of nothingness, but frays into the poetry of blues, grays, browns, mauves, wrapped in the mystery of the creative capacity of painting to become poetry and of poetry to become image.
The work, in the colours of the paintings as well as in the tones of the poems that accompany them, is thus the result of an expert dexterity that often retraces its steps and reworks a visual language made up of various thicknesses and references, all related to the artist's imagination. It’s that of someone who feels art as a poetic exercise, a breath that starts from depth and then extends into elevation, a breath that is apparition, epiphany, liberation from the formless state of matter and landing on the threshold of visibility.  
In front of these works one has the impression that they show the revelation of something that flashes for an instant, that emerges from an unknown place of which we perceive the limit between presence and absence. This is why Olivia Reuterswärd's works should be seen with the mind turned to Gauguin, when he asked us to "close our eyes in order to see better," to glimpse the apparition and not the appearance, waiting for the painting to reveal itself, in the twofold sense whereby it manifests itself and at the same time veils itself again.
The painting therefore happens in front of the viewer's eyes: threshold, limen, median space and time of assimilation, being and non-being, the place where the impossible becomes pictorial substance. In this way, Olivia Reuterswärd's works stage a kind of spatiotemporal suspension through which beauty opens to the exploration of the unknown and in which silence is never empty, but becomes meditative atmosphere that resonates and invites to be grasped. Here even the void is full of happenings: traces, holds, presences/absences, interstices and possibilities.
Here also lies the importance that in the artist's painting assumes the viewer, who does not passively witness, but participates in an apparition, welcomes it into himself by gradually accustoming his gaze, as when one stares intensely at a source of light or when, on the contrary, one adapts to the darkness until one can distinguish presences, movements and fragments of reality.
The artist's painting thus goes further, in its internal movement of space, colour and twilight, opening the pictorial field to a depth that starting from the most hidden and intimate regions of her sensibility manages to reach the viewer's gaze. As it’s expressed by Olivia Reuterswärd in the poem that accompanies the painting “La bellezza del respire”, a true programmatic text for her own work: “Searching for a hidden truth/the very basis of experience/nature’s inner/ transition/light and shadow/a direction/a route/a world beyond time and place”.
The extension of breath, the élan vital of which Henri Bergson speaks in his Creative Evolution, that breath that extends from the human to the cosmos, is measured according to a scale of delicate and liminal tonal evanescences, which bring to the surface as much the possibilities of representation as the dematerialization of the invisible, the boundary between the unrepresentable and the evidence, or "the unique appearance of a distance however close it may be," in the words Walter Benjamin.
The artist's pictorial intervention configures the space of the canvas as a gateway that leads to the depth of consciousness, to the discovery of the mystery of things and of that unrepresentable of darkness that it is necessary to value light itself: a gap, a breach, a residue, the making of presence through absence.
In Olivia Reuterswärd's works, the link between light and shadow recurs punctually from painting to painting, changing quality and temperature: it vibrates sharply, blazing and contrasted in "Fairy tale world," it is cloaked in melting, silent veils in "Breath", it becomes watery and vaporous in works such as "La dolce vita" and "Dangerous liaisons," and it dematerializes gaseously in floral apparitions, veritable shrouds of presence and absence, as in "Breath" "Sacred treasure" and "Day fever".
In all these works nature never appear in full light but vibrate before our eyes in the fertile contrast of a shadowy and inscrutable presence. Flowers, for example, show themselves surfacing in the light as they do inside the clearing of a forest, where the glow penetrates more strongly because of the slight thinning of the tree foliage, letting the light delineate shapes and colours a little at a time, dancing lightly in a tight two-step with shadow.
Olivia Reuterswärd's works visually express this dance: light emerges from the half-light and manifests itself in a sometimes hesitant, sometimes more pronounced flickering, like a sound suspended in the air, poised between returning to darkness or fading into silence, as it does in the painting "The Beauty of Breathing". Other times it manifests itself as if to suggest an advancing dawn, as in "Fairy tale world", evading the power of night. Entering and leaving among the nuances, these paintings behave as spatial and temporal thresholds that open to the gaze and refer to an elsewhere that provokes a slight vertigo, that of the enigma of the vision of beauty.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in Eye and Mind, ideally dedicated to Cézanne, that "painting, even when it seems destined for other purposes, never celebrates any other enigma than that of visibility." The enigma of the visible in Olivia Reuterswärd's painting lies in what makes it simultaneously possible and impossible, in those conditions that define the threshold across which the artist makes the invisible appear and paints, in her words, the unrepeatable moment when "the unforseen pours out." It is in the ecstatic flashing of that instant of revelation that beauty appears. In the artist's inspired words, "the beauty is seeable, it lives. The soul floats easily through the world. It feels in the heart. I don't see the painting."  
The visible in the painting brings out the invisible, it is always intimately connected to it, and here we feel it pressed under the outcropping forms of the stems and petals of flowers, as well as in the large canvases animated by gusts of wind or by the flickering breath of beauty that becomes visible. After all, these works function as windows, toward an elsewhere that lives between the inside and the outside, the word and the silence, the visible and the invisible. The nuances of light and colours elude any fixed definition of form and allow a glimpse of the grain of the world, the dust that runs through life, that conveys its deepest and most mysterious breath. The artist’s poetic words express this at its best: “The stems become dull/forbidden enter/crown petals withers/you can go in you can go out”.   
This is the extreme and secret fascination of Olivia Reuterswärd's method: the devotion to art that exceeds itself in the deep breath of life.
 

Gianluca Ranzi
Chief curator, Fondazione Mudima