“Although the themes in Susana Attías’s paintings are presented in a variety of styles, her artistic goal remains singular and unique. Her work covers a wide range of geographical and historical references: from portraits of the founding fathers of various Latin American republics, Jewish rabbis, Arab belly dancers, Japanese icons, and urban oddities to bucolic rural landscapes. Susana, however, has always emphasized the luminous vitality of the Caribbean tropics; where color takes on the festive personality of its music and dances.
A theme that Susana Attías has been working on since 1989 is a manifesto of her ecumenical vocation. Since then, and without alluding to a specific religion, she has been painting Madonnas. These icons are primarily a tribute to motherhood, the vocation that nurtures cultures around the world. Their simple composition, with nuances of many ethnic groups, goes beyond mere exaltation of the mother; they are Susana’s most intimate expression of the mother-child relationship. She is representing the tender, reassuring, and comforting instinct of women towards their children – the protective spirit that guarantees the continuity of the human race.
The faces of the Madonnas have a silent, thoughtful, almost serene quality. They transmit the warm and joyful glow of a meditative state of mind. Madonnas as a subject for painters dates back to the Byzantine period, when the spread of Christianity required didactic iconography: biblical scenes of Christ on the cross or of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. The masters of the early Italian Renaissance (13th and 14th centuries) such as Cimabue, Giotto, Duccio, Masaccio, among many others, took up that tradition which eventually developed into the sophisticated elegance of the Renaissance and Baroque Madonnas.
It has been said that art cultivates art. In today’s dizzying postmodern world, this old vision is especially true in Susana’s works. The notion of hybridity, the idea of annotation, paying homage, and sometimes reworking old artistic currents has become incredibly popular and relevant. In the work of Susana Attías, a Venezuelan-born artist living in New York, we see subjects appropriated from classical Western art and reworked within current themes and conceptual pieces.”
Extract from the presentation by Eduardo Marceles, Colombian writer and art critic, Curator and Multicultural Coordinator of the Queens Museum of Art in New York City.
Translation: Daniel González Gómez
If Susana Attías’s current works are both very uninhibited and very vigorous, as an expression of a feeling of self-assurance and mastery over the resources of her painting craft, it is due not only to her sensibility and talent, but also to the entire development of her valuable preceding experience.
Susana Attías’s painting was (and still is, albeit in a different way) a torrential painting: a true and extraordinary torrent of energy, sensibility, imagination, and nerve that flows impetuously onto the canvas, on the verge of overflowing.
When looking at Susana Attías’s works, we are assailed by a great profusion of forms and vibrant colors, painted with utmost spontaneity, directly onto the canvas, without sketches or prior studies, and without hesitation, as if emerging from a single sudden impulse.
All that baroque and exuberant turbulence seemed to slow down a bit when the artist, perhaps with the purpose of self-control, created a series of paintings inspired by classical Japanese prints. These, despite being very free interpretations, allowed her to try another type of experience in the structuring of her works, more synthetic and with great economy of means: and that Japanese stage helped her to lose the “horror vacui” of her preceding production. From that stage derive others that now culminate in the works of this exhibition at La Galería Okyo, with their characters in dark suits. In these recent paintings, strength is concentrated, instead of being dispersed as in earlier stages. From Dionysian agitation and visual extravagance, the artist now moves to the severity of her large central forms, simple, austere, but perhaps more powerful than her previous overflows: Instead of the extroversion of formal language, there is rather its introversion; it turns in on itself (without reaching self-absorption) and the creative act becomes an act elevated to the second power, which does not merely give way to pure effusiveness, but thinks of itself, yet without losing all its spontaneity, its vitality, or its energy load.
Susana Attías has not shed her proliferating baroque style, but her current production condenses into this type of work, such as those she shows us on this occasion. They are compact, powerful, and more expressionistic images.
Her rabbis and other characters in dark suits and hats remain full of color nuances, semi-merged into the dark planes, and very strong, seemingly compulsive strokes. And the discreet presence of some kind of humor is not uncommon. These characters, which indirectly evoke the theme of religion, are treated with nonchalance and sympathy, not without humor, rather than solemnity. But they are not light images, but dense ones, loaded with affective connotations. In short, with this exhibition, Susana Attías confirms the validity of her creative talent.
Perán Erminy. October 1993
Susana Gordon 