By Alanna Lockward
Charo Oquet has systematically disregarded disciplinary boundaries in her artistic practice inspired above all by Afro-centric cosmologies, alchemy and shamanism. In this conversation we learn how deep each one of her journeys into painting, sculpture and performance is embedded in her trance-like creative stamina. The new series, Collage Paintings, inaugurate yet another exciting period in her prolific career, resonating with her characteristic bold use of color and her phenomenal insight into movement and volume. In conversation with Oquet, we explore and celebrate her freedom of movement between abstract and figurative painting, between performance and action painting, and above all between the multiple junctions of that infinite skeleton known as space.
AL. There is an umbilical chord, a kind of leitmotiv that connects the different material and metaphorical dimensions in this new series. What is the first word that comes to mind when you think about this?
CO: The first word would be “connection”. I often use string, plastic ribbon and rope, in my installations and sculptures as well as in my performance work for metaphorical reasons. It is also a natural material to use for me. I think it has to do with connection, binding, pulling together, gathering, tying. My first reference are the Nkisi Nkondi sculptures and the Paquet Kongo of Haitian Vodou. In these African objects strings are used as symbolic umbilical chords binding together and augmenting the power of the loas. The Nkisis were used to connect living individuals and communities with the spirit world for purposes of divination, healing and protection. I believe that the ideas of string theory in quantum physics are a reference too. We are all somehow connected no matter how unlikely this might seem. We are all made of the same matter. There are so many connections in the universe, today they materialize on the web for example, but these connections have always been palpable via rhythms or electricity. In these Collage Works there is a connection between a large painting and a smaller one, like a sprouting of a plant or a child connected to its mother through the umbilical cord, something that is born of something else. These strings connectors are very present in my award-winning installation In the Blink of an Eye, 26 Bienal Nacional de Artes Visuales (2011) at the Museum of Modern Art in Santo Domingo, and in my installation Power House for the exhibition Art, Religion and Politics (2005), curated by Jean-Hubert Martin at the PAC Milan.
AL. Your long-term engagement with chaos and synergy is also palpable. Since you recently experimented with monochrome in those wonderful sculptures from 2003-2007 I wonder if you could imagine doing this new series using the same resources. In other words, how attached are these new pieces to color?
The sculptures you are referring to actually started out as multi-color pieces but were later covered by one color paint and then with clear epoxy resin. These new pieces could not work in a monochrome palate. Color plays a huge role in this new series. I am basically a colorist: I love color. I ascribe meaning to colors either as healing devices or as a vehicle for exchanging different types of energy. Also, these new pieces are precisely about delinking from old patterns in order to create something new. Like life itself, we as people are constantly in motion. Ilya Prigogine’s theory of dissipative structures states that open systems are in continual exchange of energy with the environment. We are all dissipative structures. We are regrouping and changing continuously in order to survive. Perhaps with these paintings I am suggesting that it all does not have to be perfect. I dislike 'perfection' and things that are too tidy and neat. The big is always made up of small parts. As living organisms, we are highly organized but always in process, mimicking the rest of the universe. Instability and a bit of chaos is the key to transformation. Rigidity is death.
AL. Reassembling has been a constant in your sculptural work. Recovering material and giving it a new space to navigate meaning. Please tell us more about the intuitive mood that guides this process. Would you associate it in any way with channeling a certain energy as a “Servidora de Misterios” in Dominican Vodou, or is it a more formal intention, or maybe a combination of both?
CO: I like the idea of painting and not painting. Let me clarify what I mean by this: In this new work I paint on canvas and then I cut it up and paste it together to create a new work. There is some randomness to it but there is a deliberate act of putting something together as an in a puzzle, finding pieces that fit and play off each other. There is a very special sense of discovery in this reassembling act.
I painted large pieces of canvases that I later intervened and cut. Some of them were made with thick paint, others with very translucent ones and without primer so they ended up soaked in paint. I truly enjoy this action, the physicality of it. I love the action of painting and throwing paint on canvas like Jackson Pollock. Painting, to me, is both an action and a performance. I love the idea of merging all the different mediums that I work with into one. I am always creating an installation as I am performing, and my installations are also marked by painting, because I am very aware of colors and of creating a large visual image that when seen altogether is almost like a 3-D painting. Similarly, I also juxtapose colors and fabrics, wood, tape and other materials to create a bi-dimensional sculpture. In other words, this work is almost more sculptural than pictorial in the traditional way. They are flat but they are more physical than visual. When I work with sculpture I have a natural fluency that I don’t have in painting. Painting demands very deep concentration and you are sort of creating a world, giving shape and form to ideas that have not yet been materialized. These new works are more physical, there is more touch and play, it is a performance, because I am working with something that exist in 3-D and I can manipulate it. When I am painting I am sort of channeling certain energy. I am almost in a trance-like state. I am in such a rush because the ideas just flow out of my head, often faster than I can grasp them and it is impossible to stop the flow. When I finally come down, I study what I have done under this state and I will look at it for a long time and meditate on it, eventually making some formal changes. This new series represents my current approach to installation and painting as performance.
In my work there are many references to Shamanism, Vodou and Alchemy. There are also references to spiritual traditions from Ethiopia or Sanskrit writing in which graphic inscriptions are believed to be endowed with sacred attributes, representing the embodiment of the divine and which are also the vehicle of powerful religious teachings. The capacity of writing to bring about changes in people's lives lends itself to contexts of divination and healing. I think of myself as a painter more than anything else. I am not sure if this is due to painting being my first medium after drawing. As a child I drew a lot, but I did not get much of a chance to paint until I was in my teens. I love the idea of the artist as a Shaman who presumably enters chaos for the greater good, crossing the thresholds, and then descending to the realm of Death in order to heal and combat evil. I like to create works that are cathartic, that provoke emotional, spiritual and physical reactions.
AL. It is very hard for me to disassociate your journey from figuration to abstraction without thinking of Vassily Kandinsky. Please help me with this,c ould you name a non-Western influence, hopefully a woman artist, that you could be in dialogue with in relation to this particular new series?
When I started to paint my first solo show consisted of abstract works. The show was composed of both sculptures and paintings, which had sort of squares and rectangular shapes in a mixture of painting and drawing. Therefore, for me to shift from abstract to figurative painting is quite easy. I don’t want to name anyone in particular as my inspirations are so diverse, I go from the original abstractionists to contemporary abstract art. My work is in conversation with all of these periods. The work is also in conversation with Dominican Graffiti and urban architectural decay in general. It is the kind of architecture where you improvise with the elements at hand. Out of these kind of disparities, juxtaposing and mixtures of objects emerges great-unexpected beauty. Spaces that are decaying and falling apart – covered with whatever people can find to keep their dwellings whole. There is truth the quote from Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza, that "in a city the atmosphere is all around you and is ever changing. New things will become old things, so the idea f continuity is very real. Time is a great architect". It is this rearranging and recomposing of materials that I truly love. It is done out of great necessity. My friend Ernesto Oroza has a theory on the “Architecture of Necessity”. This type of do-it-yourself architecture inspires me. I think I want to give pictorial and tridimensional form to that kind of aesthetics. This what you see when you go deep into the city of Santo Domingo and the surrounding suburbs and you look inside houses and shacks.
AL What kind of discoveries do you find once a piece is “finished”, what do they tell you about yourself? Do you sometimes start with a certain idea and go in a different direction?
CO: When I am painting I am in a rush. I am almost in a performance trance. I allow myself to go into different directions instantaneously. I basically put lots of materials in front of me and allow myself to experiment, changing or discovering the idea as I work. I never have a fixed idea, as that would be illustration. I have notions of what I want but I am discovering it as I am doing, because as they say in Spanish – Del dicho al hecho hay mucho trecho (from the saying to do doing there is a big distance). You can imagine things but it is not until you actually give it form that you know if it will work and while getting there one may discover something new. You must always be open to that type of possibility.
AL. Josep Renau, Hannah Höch, those are also obligatory references when thinking of collage and reassamblage. But they both use photography. Since some of your work is very much photography based, I wonder how obvious it was for you to avoid using them in this new series.
I have never been very interested in the reassamblage of figurative work or photographs. Although I have used figurative elements in collage once, I later covered them with tape. I am more about manipulating materials. Those artists are not my references at all, even though I do admire their work.
AL. There is a constant in your work related to horror-vacui which is a quintessential element in religious iconography. What is the role of the empty space in this new series?
CO: I am not sure. I felt a strong need to leave an empty space in this work. In the center of many of these paintings there is a hole. I have not decided why yet. Maybe it is like the Nkisi Nkondi sculptures where there is a sort of center or mirror. I suppose I wanted to replicate this empty space making it almost circular. A point of entry perhaps? Or maybe a solar plexus chakra honoring life? The word chakra is derived from Sanskrit and it means wheel. If we were able to see the chakras we would observe a wheel of energy continuously revolving or rotating. Some of the pieces in this new series appear to reproduce this type of motion.