Amanda Shepard, Vice President & COO
Contemporary art is a moving target, enjoying its title only as long as the life and recent memory of its practitioners. What is contemporary will become past, and living artists compete for a role in this story of art as it is written. And yet, the art of history is never really history. Its influence and effects on successive generations can be just as powerful, if not more, than when it was contemporary.
This is certainly true of the art and artists that have taken root in the heart and mind of Gabriela Gonzalez Dellosso. Moved by the lives of unsung female artists that came before her, Dellosso brings them back to life with her brush, knowing them so intimately that she herself becomes them on canvas. But this is no vanity project to supplant another’s legacy to secure her own. This is a painter’s desire to gather the scattered, and perhaps lost, women artists of the past and give them their rightful place in the great tradition of realism. Neither time nor lack of recorded memory will quell that desire. Indeed, only by identifying with these women in scenes from their own lives, or as subjects in their own works, can Dellosso know them well enough to tell their story.
The importance of a more complete history of art that includes these women is reason enough to make these paintings, but Dellosso gives us more than that. With her countless gifts, she tells us about the person—not just the artist—who has been forgotten and invites us into her world. This world sparkles before our very eyes, defying the centuries between us and existing always now.
Of all the ways of making art, realist painters possess the unique ability to traverse both the unreachable past and the anticipated future. With every stroke, the artist leaves evidence of her very self in a material designed to last for hundreds of years, what we might call “forever” in our mortal capacity. In the presence of the works of Gentileschi, Leyster, or Fontana, the artists are near to me in the stray brush hair locked into the paint, or in the directional strokes visible in the raking light. I stand before the very canvas they lived with until the paint was dry. And so it is with Dellosso, who is united with admirers who see her paintings around the world, and those who will after she is gone.
Abstraction can also be our time traveling vehicle: there is perhaps more evidence of the human hand (or foot) in a Pollock, Rothko, or Frankenthaler than there is in a refined realist painting. The abstractionists, too, recognized that material was necessary to express, and therefore make visible, the immaterial they so vividly experienced. The act of painting itself, so highly regarded for its immediacy and its expressive potential, would come to reveal the very essence of the individual artist, down to his most subjective, yet unseen, experiences, and the paintings themselves would be the manifestation of but a moment.
For them, they were representing reality—the true reality of the individual as he really is with nothing to impose upon his “self”. Painting, too, would be unconstrained: no standards, no expectations, and no comparisons. Just pure painting. This quest for purity led to the ongoing distillation of painting down to merely mark making, with the finished canvas serving as evidence of the act, which held more value than the object. When we reach this end, why not just pantomime the act of painting and do away with the paint itself?
To consider this question, of course, is to imagine our existence without the material, which is not, in fact, how we exist. The quest for ever purer, ever more perfect painting must stop short of the absurd conclusion of art with no object, of form without matter. The abstractionists are right that reality can be immaterial, but the realists understand this without shunning the material. By representing the physical world on canvas, realists faithfully use the integrated language of natural proportion, coherent narrative, and the properties of light to speak to us about all of reality, both what we can know with our senses and what we can know through subjective experience.
Dellosso uses this language of embodied reality to do all of the things the abstractionists desired: to convey emotion, revel in the act of painting, and communicate something of herself. As the model herself for most of her subjects, we gaze deeply at both the artist and the woman she portrays. In Dellosso’s work, everything is there: the artist, the act, the painting, the story, the feeling, and, indeed, the whole person.
See The Paintings of Gabriela Gonzalez Dellosso: A Retrospective at FWMoA now through July 14th, 2024.
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