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...
You do a lot of drawing between paintings, and many of those drawings and sketches focus on distinct representations, people and faces and interactions happening in front of you at any moment. But in your paintings, those images seem tucked below the top layer, distorted and exaggerated recognitions that often anchor the sense of place and distill the density but still remain relatively indistinct. Are they there to act as memories, more traces than connected forms, anchors to hold in place the painting’s position in the entropy?
Iva:
I draw constantly and record both experiences (things I see, remember, invent) and the movement of my hand on a surface. It’s at once diaristic and automatic. My paintings take months to make and I do bury a lot in them. I think that the reason why people are able to find their way into the paintings is not because of the color or the composition, but because of all these fragments, or what I call “moments of intimacy”. Most people like to see or discover the familiar like plants, other people, animals, etc…. but these fragments I use, these buried drawings of stuff, also offer the viewer a simple pleasure of discovered recognition. Jed Perl in Antoine’s Alphabet: Watteau and His World suggests that “much of the fragment’s fascination has to do with its delicious air of possibility, for a fragment provokes a partial experience that can leave us with a heightened awareness of what we are missing”. And what we are missing has its own desire, its own whimsy and tenderness. It becomes the missing part I’m intrigued with the most because it has its own pull, a reality I intuit but which remains mostly unknown until the viewer steps in.
Patrick:
It seems this is what is really distinguishing your latest direction with your series you label either Seascapes or Snowscapes. These fragments appear to have always taken some form in your paintings, they are there in West Drift and Desert Willow and The Gardener. But if I go to one of my favorite earlier paintings, Seated Woman, Rose from 2017, the representation is almost cubist. I’m immediately reminded of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, blocks of color and swaths of paintbrush build the momentum of a change agent on a formalist framework. But then working forward to Snowscape: Breeze, the figures that were once flattened to the surface to construct a memory are now committed to the lines that make it real.
Iva:
I am committed to exploring the relief because it lends tactility and therefore heightened reality. The cords, knots, layers of gauze, the scratched marks, rubbings, holes… they relieve the eye of its domination. Seascape: Moon Breeze is full of contradictions. With it I explored juxtaposing the anti-illusionism of Tapie’s surfaces and Monet’s lyricism.
In the work prior to 2018 the black line stitched and elaborated the space and patches of color. But the line that erupted in the Pompeii gray paintings is wild and agitated. It contradicts, it jumps, it records. It was then that I felt my kinship with Pollock’s psychoanalytic drawings from the early 30’s, ones which are buried deep within the layers of his abstractions. I describe it as life energy imprinting itself on matter.
Patrick:
So does abstraction then no longer become a style but rather a surface for entropy, the perfect playground for nature?
Iva:
I love that idea of abstraction as a playground for nature for many reasons. Even though abstract painting can easily collapse into decoration or acceptable aesthetics, I remain very interested in its history and possibilities. Looking at Pollock's works on paper alone points out infinite possibilities, as does Fontana’s cuts. Abstraction, in Fontana’s case, opens up the surface to the void. The cuts, slashes and holes that are his assault on the surface leave gapes black and hollowed beyond memory, beyond identity and reason. Pollock traces images of creatures made of swirls, the fury of the mind made visible in line and color with insatiable inventiveness as though form has no boundaries or end points. Perhaps the disorder and entropy you reference is this unspeakable abundance. I find that when the disorder is at its height, I am able to absorb and accept many of the practices and thoughts summed up in historical surrealism, dadaism, abstract expressionism, minimalism, etc… but less so when these same practices and thoughts assume too much clarity and authority.
Let's take the grid as an example. The grid as I employ it is related to my love of textiles and fabric. Growing up in Bulgaria we took our sheets to be washed (nobody had washing machines or access to clean rivers) and I loved going with my grandmother to pick them up. They came back warm and wrapped in thick brown paper tied with twine. When we laid them back over the beds, I loved seeing the grid of large squares drawn out by the hard creases in the perfectly white field of cotton. It looked like a chess board. I also loved putting my face so close that I could observe the way each thread repeated that same interlocking structure of intersected vertical and horizontal lines. We also had “kilims”, very colorful woven carpets with wild shapes and colors. I discovered that these textiles posed as surfaces, but they were really very sentimental structured terrains bearing the weight of layers. And in those layers I saw time getting captured and bent, a grid in the real rather than from some notion of order, purity or transcendence.
And that’s the grid that structured my Pompeii Gray paintings. The surfaces are very layered and meant to appear fragile and dust-like. Their dryness is evocative and appropriate to the quality of the black line that traverses the terrain and draws out the figures of animals and big breasted humanoid females. I thought about the many photographs I saw as a child of “Madarski Konnik”, a massive relief of a horseman carved on the side of a cliff by the Tracians. I loved the fuzzy black and white images and held them in ways to imagine standing there and looking up at the hooves and belly. It was a way to become unstuck from the frontal image of the photograph and experience it as a form bending to accommodate the relief. This way of looking helps me find the glitches, witnessing moments of both grace and deformity rendering the surface more rubbery, witnessing layers and grids that distort both perception and time.
That is why I have been calling most of my latest series of paintings either Snowscapes or Seascapes, as a way to point to a surface that both reveals and conceals a depth. I gravitate towards “scape” because it refers to a not-yet-designated space.
I actually started Snowscape: Excavation by painting over one of the Pompeii Gray paintings I called The … of Tomalley, which was painted on top of an exuberant colorful abstraction from 2006. I used cords of gauze to mark a series of parallel lines like a tailor measuring fabric. I thought about how Agnes Martin used string to guide her pencil. But I was mostly thinking of Mondrian’s Seascapes with their undulating black marks advancing an intensely consistent force and rhythm. My gauze cords were drenched in paint and floppy, and they are very hard to control. But they leave articulate imprints, what I call “recordings”, a reference I use for the consequential markings of the terrain by materials unencumbered. More recently I have been scratching with the wood of the brush directly on sheets of gauze or muslin laid over layers of gauze saturated with paint. The scratching records the interaction between various processes and materials, between layers and surfaces, recording the absorption and saturation and pressure of that moment. The same mark is recorded differently by each layer, so they are temporarily identical but spatially distanced. Collage iterates this further. It’s like passing down a story from generation to generation, a history colored in its discovery.
Patrick:
In Snowscape: Grid, you have established what is almost a blueprint for nature. Movement ripples forward advanced by folds that chapter across the surface. But in the lower left corner, the veil is lifted and we are provided a not-so-subtle reminder that the anti-natural, the Gray, the Surrealists’ order still lurks below… so that it should not be forgotten?
Iva:
The black space, the void …. I was compelled to do it. Something about all the gold iridescence of the rest of the painting demanded this harsh contrast, this unveiling. I was also thinking of ruins, the way missing facades reveal voids and hidden armatures become exposed.
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