Critics At Large : Synchronicity: The Haunting of Renata

Saturday, June 16, 2018

Synchronicity: The Haunting of Renata

Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m the one who is haunted and not her, or not the photographs of this compelling, spooky, charming and frightening photographer. Maybe I like being spooked. I admit it. I search for it, I have an appetite for the melancholy readiness to witness the poetry of everyday life posing right in front of us so brazenly that it’s all but a mirage, ghostly and seemingly invisible to the average happy eye. Most of these arresting images are from 2016.

A dog's life.

I can only imagine what shimmering vistas of miniature opera this present year may bring. I look forward to the chill entering my spine and traveling from head to foot. Wagnerova approaches, with equal alacrity and clarity, the formats of portrait, still life, landscape and abstraction, as well as embracing the simultaneously ancient and modern themes of nature, self, society, and spirituality. Often she does all this at the same time, in the same photograph, or at least certainly in a sequential manner almost signifying narrative and storytelling.

Well, now that I have already admitted to an affinity for the melancholy in art (and music, and architecture, and food, for that matter) which first began to emerge in may teenage years when I discovered the great 1649 book by Robert Burton called The Anatomy of Melancholy, my question here is a simple one. Am I merely projecting this fondness of my own upon the images of Wagnerova, or is there a potent sense of dark beauty, almost Gothic at times, sometimes even neo-baroque in flavour, in the images themselves?

I maintain that it is only once they have accumulated in the viewer’s eyes and begun to take up temporary residence in the dim corners of his or her mind that the fibula, the story, of the images begins to emerge. You tell me. So I’ll stop talking for a moment, something not easily accomplished in my case, and let you decide for yourself from what unearthly metaphysical menu these tantalizing but disturbing images have been drawn.

Self Portrait, 2016 variable dimensions.

Self Portrait, 2016 variable dimensions.

Self Portrait, 2016 variable dimensions

Still Life object, 2016.

Well, I imagine that even the most happy and content beings among you can relate to the scintillatingly salient point I’m making here. It requires no effort whatsoever.

Untitled, 2017.

What I would call her psychological palette does tend to shift, from self to objects to buildings and landscapes and eventually returns back to her own body as an object and a landscape.

Untitled, 2017.

However, one pervasive mood, one I would term the joyfully teary, is always lurking elusively but brilliantly just around the corner. The four corners of your beating heart. And just consider how incredibly montage-like the gorgeous images of this talented Amsterdam-based artist are.

Whenever I see a film, a movie, a work of cinematic art, I immediately think of and see photographs, since that’s what it is: a sequence of twenty images per second (or used to be before the digital realm obliterated time). And whenever I see a sequence of still photographs, especially if they follow a theme in a serial fashion that begins to trigger the narrative function, I think of and see a movie, one that lies in the future tense of the images as assembled by the viewer’s mind.

As I mentioned, Wagnerova’s photographs shift in their scale and locale from portrait to still life to landscape to abstract, and back again, looping in and out of the varied but still basic thematic zones available to the aesthetic touch of any artist in any medium: self, nature, society and spirituality. All other themes are really subjects or topics, subordinate to these over-arching templates of content and dancing in between one form and another, until they reach the ultimate fusion of form and content: the “movie.”

But it her examination of her own corporeal presence, the female form she occupies, as a subject, a place, a domain, a territory, a landscape, inherently an object, a still life and a portrait, her deft touch becomes fully realized and also fully unnerving. The sequential structure she chooses for these enigmatic emblems of embodiment are also striking cinematic in tone and tempo, and can be arranged and rearranged in any order to manifest different elements of stationary movies.

Untitled, 2017.

One of the most fascinating things about this Dutch photographer is the fact that in general she tends to specialize in the realm of architecture, and specifically in the poetics of space (as per Gaston Bachelard). This is true, most revealingly, whether the architecture in question is very small, such as a fish or seashell, or medium, like a trumpet or vase, or large, like a tree or forest, or staircase, or huge, like grand buildings smashing into the sky.

Her personal poetics is focused upon the presence of forms in space, not on the scale they present to our customarily judgmental eyes. And her images show us something we ordinarily might overlook: the strange synchronicity that haunts the three dimensions we primarily occupy, the overlaps between the very small and the very big, the very personal and the very grandiose.

In addition, her works are for me a unique kind of homeopathic remedy for the inherent melancholy saturating the human condition. This is not a question of trying to eliminate sadness or even of trying to inflate its importance and project it all over the beauty that surrounds us. Indeed, it is precisely about embracing that beauty in the midst of and at the edge of human limits. Her true subject matter, it seems to me, is the testing of boundaries we place around our hearts, minds and bodies. Her images are maps of that nebulous territory which commences when all boundaries evaporate.

Untitled, 2017.

– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, and is a frequent curator of film programs for Pacific Cinematheque. His current work in progress is a new book called Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, being released by Backbeat Books in Fall 2018.