In early 2023, Iva began what would become a year-long correspondence with Patrick Theimer that explores the tenacity and ambition of her multidisciplinary practice. The following is an excerpt from that exchange, and the full conversation will become available soon. Be sure to stay connected for more...
by Patrick Theimer.
A day in your studio changed the way I see.
When I arrived, the first thing I noticed were patterns. There’s a rhythm to them, a tempo, a performance that welcomes me in. They move because I move, they connect the spaces I occupy and seem to build a causal core. Patterns lean against the wall where paintings stack in threes like dimensional triptychs chaptered to complete a thought. Patterns spread across the floor where materials quilt storylines in a meshed and braided language. There are even patterns in the paint where gray and white mottled monotones temper color from escape in layered epochs of a rehearsed history. It’s an easy place to fit in.
Your first remarks are about the surface. You describe the physicality, the fight, the tension. The surface is a battlefield that grounds an artist to her intentions. And I find that intention expressed in your lines. I follow them. They weave and carve and bend to edge a mindful impression. You tell me what I am seeing is not abstract, it would not exist without the experience of nature. But it feels automatic, spontaneous, sometimes monstrous. I dare to mention Surrealism, and you tell me no, it’s not that subconscious. Maybe it’s because there seems to be an overwhelming need to be seen, an egoistic sense of self. Held to a surface. Screaming at me.
Sometimes the surface is intact. Sometimes it is worn through so we see a new surface behind it. It’s almost voyeuristic, a peephole to something we are dared to explore. It displaces attention, moves it away from the painting’s vanity, a sort of wormhole to invite an infinite possibility. That’s a very intimate moment. You are granting permission to leave, permission to return, permission to discover another. I think it is the zero moment of your sublime, and the reduction of your mark to its most intense density. Everything you do will eventually fall through.
This is the painting we need now.
I’m there in front of Snowscape: Excavation.
It’s breathtaking, masterful. It feels devotional. This painting is a beautiful, brilliant unrest. It’s a surface bending to the gravity of your materials, lines fractured, colors molten. Structure is its history. But disorder plies the traditions we credit for the harmony of the plastic aesthetic. We witness layers that grow grotesque when applied to the real inside out. It’s still no different than the purity of a Martin or a Mondrian. But it does require more ego, more self, more permission than the construct of refined disciplines. Order to disorder.
And there too are your tapestries.
The earliest of these appear very primal, impulsive with color, spitting and spewing an esophageal rainbow. They present like assemblages of utopian vision boards, manifestations of what we hope our dreams and perhaps the natural world could someday become, or at least to the standards of others. Dona in the Garden, Dusk Noon, even Placenta paste and stain and patch a picture more prescribed than believed. What I see are paintings pulling themselves apart, laughing hysterically, camouflaged in smiles of smeared lipstick. I think these are your most curious paintings. They’re not quite organic. But they are necessary.
Because then there’s Nestinarki.
Suddenly your tapestries before and all of their color and chaos collapse into an ethos cage. It's a more nurtured density, still mangled and manic but now reduced to an order and locked within the grid. The image impresses like a photogram, you’re wrapped in those tapestry layers silhouetted to a howling moon. It’s a painting that feels very personal, much more honest, as though a painting you made for yourself and no one else. No more vision boards. No more dreaming in color. It feels like something you needed to find in the natural world.
Because then there’s your series Pompeii Gray.
You became, as Dona Nelson so perfectly identified, silent. Muted. Despotic. And these paintings do feel very much like a cleansing demanding renewal, neutered to as bare an essential as your mark will allow. As a viewer these paintings feel more like reflections and impressions, states of suspended thought that question if it ever really happened. Was Four Maidens is this series at its very best: mummified figures anchor an ashen hollow; there’s just enough color to posture life; it’s a celebration, or perhaps a mourning, either way it is the same. And this is accomplished because the collage, the material you typically use to build and sculpt and even disrupt, is now struggling to hold it all in place, shouldering the weight of reflection, collapsing, brittle, vulnerable. Your life source is now a deconstructing agent.
But then there’s Flower Mother.
A molting, fertile Phoenix, harvesting light from the gray and flowers from the ash. A story of creation? The Big Bang?
Order to disorder.
How?
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