Julie Mehretu’s Baroque look back
Cay Sophie Rabinowitz enters the interior worlds of the New York-based
painter Julie Mehretu and discovers a new contemporary definition of
Baroque in her work.
Julie Mehertu, 2005, Photo: Peter Rad
Julie Mehretu’s paintings and drawings involve complicatedly
composed combinations. By juxtaposing architectural CAD models, gestural
marks and geometric coloured forms, the New York-based, Ethiopian-born
artist attempts to translate a dynamic experience of empowerment that is
part fact and part fiction, contextualized by history and canonized by
dream. Inspired by her family genealogies, documents and news reports from
the past that are so much defined by cultural mixing, migration and war,
Mehretu looks forward to what could be possible if individuals and masses
could design and determine the structures that direct, protect and
embellish them. (Read an interview with the artist
here.)
At first, Mehretu’s abstraction may suggest an apparent
affinity with Surrealist automatic drawing, where gestures, characters and
forms are presumed to reveal the particulars of an individual’s
personality. In her paintings, these activities and forms are
self-contained constructions that develop intuitively, rather like a
psycho-geographic experience: everything done with these signs immediately
effects what they are supposed to represent. Like in a holographic image,
the luminously structured details of Mehretu’s pictures transmit
multi-dimensional visual characteristics that deny monoscopic narrative
and perspective. She combines linguistic, psychological and historical
approaches to culture resulting in a characteristically contemporary
baroque oeuvre.
Julie Mehretu in her Studio, 2005, Photo: Peter Rad
The term baroque has often been used to designate a stylistic period of
extravagant artificiality and ornamentation in post-
Renaissance,
Counter-Reformation European art and literature. More recently, it has
come to describe particular instances of cultural alterity. Within this
discourse, the baroque functions in Mehretu’s work as a trope for a
complex ethnic and artistic mixture, rather than as a reference to the
European hegemonic conception of the term historical period or
iconography. This idiosyncratic contemporary baroque is an emancipating
and transculturating one.
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Mehretu’s project might seem inconsistent with
Counter-Reformation religious fervor, but, historically, the baroque was
also a period of substantial cultural transformation, when there were
radical changes in conceptions of the subject. It was a period preoccupied
with passion, with making the artistic material, whether paint, marble,
language, fabric or flesh, yield to signs of emotion, a period of
elaborated surfaces heavy with multiple, even contradictory,
significations. In this sense, whether Mehretu’s works resist, mobilize or
recontextualize the baroque, they seem to have a stake in exploring its
potential.
As part of the paintings’ configured relationship of
individuals and communities, there are amorphous marks that “signify
characters that socialize”, as Mehretu says. These “characters” — Mehretu
also calls them her “private urban fighters” – come into the work and
build space rather than just inhabiting it. These characters relate to
architecture transmorphically: they seem to gather, walk (even march)
through walls and pierce foundations. Uncannily, the wire-drawn models
never become dismantled or get destroyed; rather structures co-mingle,
co-join, and sometimes, if directed by the characters, they might even
assume altered states.
Looking Back to a Bright New Future, 2003, (c) Courtes carlier | gebauer
In Mehretu’s painting Looking Back to a Bright New Future (2003)
drawings of built environments, such as arenas, public squares and
transportation centres make up a primary layer of the composition, but
these structures do not confine or contain other elements in the work. In
this painting, space and movement are defined by a set of concerns that
have already been revised and are being translated. The technique which
Mehretu employed for this painting is slightly different from her approach
to other works. During the period leading up to the Iraq war, the artist
began to reconsider the subject of independence, its forms and
consequences. She decided to revisit an earlier work titled
Transcending: The New International (2003), a large-scale, colourless
painting with swirling shaded areas and moody forms. The layer of wire
drawings forming the historical part of this work are based on modernist
African
city designs that were developed along with
African independence movements in the 1950s and have since become decrepit
and dysfunctional. Central to this and her subsequent work, Looking
Back to a Bright New Future, is the fact that most of the
architectural drawings render independence plazas, a key feature of the
Modernist African International Style.
Aiming to understanding the
dynamic of that complex painting, Mehretu traced the original painting’s
groups of characters which, she says, “evolved as the composition
developed”. As a map of communities that the characters created around
appropriated architectural designs of surrounding independence plazas, it
became Mehretu’s source material for Looking Back to a Bright New
Future:
Drawings (new constructions) #11, 2003
Deutsche Bank Collection, (c) Courtesy carlier | gebauer
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