Artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye paints one of her canvases in the Utopia community, Central AustraliaPenny Tweedie (Alamy/CORDON PRESS)
He saw what could still be done;
This was his great achievement.
She understood WB Yeats's phrase “the enchanted eye” and gave it an intense and active meaning.
In her painterly gestures there was courage, search and a kind of fearlessness.
She was not afraid, for example, to repeat herself, to make the same type of marks and then see what surprise the moment of realization would bring.
She, too, wasn't afraid to change what she was doing, to find a completely new set of tones and textures.
And she wasn't afraid of beauty, she wasn't afraid to find a set of wonderful colors and see where they would lead her.
Like her, she was not afraid to work with a more muted palette, using the color black, for example, with masterful confidence.
Paul Klee spoke of drawing as “a line that went for a walk.”
For Kngwarreye, a painting was a way to have a total vision, a vast storehouse of knowledge—historical, visual, spiritual—to go for a ride.
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Paintings are part of their context, whether we like it or not.
Kngwarreye, an Australian Aboriginal artist from the Utopia community of the Northern Territory, was born in 1910 and died in 1996. She painted on canvas for less than a decade at the end of her life.
There are other people who know the tradition from which she came and what her paintings meant to her own community, how they related to the time in which they were made and the timelessness that must have concerned her as well.
I look at it with Irish eyes: the context fades away, overcome by the weight and density of the dream that is shaped and invoked in these paintings.
There was, somewhere at the root of his talent, a kind of wildness, an immediacy, a pressing need to make the mark, but also, at the center of his imagination, was the urgency to create balance and to work systematically. and structured.
Kngwarreye may have been a great colorist, but her genius lies in how she saw the limits of the canvas, how she imagined the architecture and layout that should impact the viewer's nervous system.
She was a great cerebral painter and at the same time someone who worked instinctively.
She differed little from other painters in allowing both impulse and limits to battle each other in stimulating and fruitful ways when she set to work.
He used his head when he painted, but the result was not cold or mechanical.
On the contrary, Kngwarreye created the illusion of the organic, working with procedure, development and flourishing;
Sometimes the paintings suggest an overwhelming kind of warmth, an exultant painterly sensibility at play.
There was an element of magic, of pure alchemy, in what he did.
He trusted the paint, his marks were bright and fresh, the dots, strokes, lines and brushstrokes were full of life, but they also followed a design, they were configured and controlled.
It may be too easy to say that Kngwarreye was all brilliance and bold line.
Goethe's definition of color as a “turbulent light” may help us see the breadth of what he did more clearly.
Some of the paintings are brief statements.
It was as if the fullness of the world pleased him, but Kngwarreye also paid attention to what hides in the light, the strange and what is beyond our understanding.
She was the painter of what lies beneath, elements that must be registered in a subtle and mysterious way, of what is between things and allows a full look at what the world was like.
Many of his paintings were presented as abstract statements, using spiraling heroic gestures, evidence of the captured moment, inspired versions of what poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called “inner landscape.”
His colors and lines are full of immediacy and energy.
However, this only partly explains the strength of his work.
There are other ways of reading his pictorial legacy.
The works of the Australian painter are not made to delight us, but to transform us
Perhaps it makes more sense, or helps us see her work better, if we imagine her working as a cartographer of a landscape that is fully known—in a physical and visceral way—and inhabited in a spiritual and pure way, but also exact and precise.
If we affirm that for her, as for many artists, the forms of nature had a sanctity, a hidden power, a deep provocation, we could learn to look at these paintings correctly.
Her task was to evoke the underlying power of things as a fortune teller would, as a visionary might.
But what she saw was not ethereal, supernatural or vague.
The shapes she worked with were the shapes she observed and not the shapes she dreamed.
While the scope of her art is large, the details of it are focused;
The colors and contours of her work come from knowledge, from fierce attention, from meticulous study.
The paintings resist interpretation.
Sometimes there seems to be a path or a pattern, a set of marks that connect, that suggest something that is dynamic and not random, that evoke growth, forces of nature that compete and yield.
Sometimes the color is also dazzling;
The paintings cause an impact that forces the viewer to stop thinking or trying to understand or interpret, forcing them, instead, to look, just look.
With their austere force, their captivating immediacy and their complex emotional force, Kngwarreye's paintings propose a way of being in the world.
They are not made to delight us, but to transform us.
They make us abandon the idea that we can control nature, understand light and pattern or easily assimilate the energy around us.
(...)
Edward Said has written about the “late style”, about what happens to a composer, a writer or a painter at the end of his life, at a moment when everything has been said and there is the possibility of a new one emerging. debauchery, austere simplicity or intense freedom.
This happens with dazzling force in the work of, for example, WB Yeats and Beethoven.
Kngwarreye, approaching the end of his life, worked with the total freedom of a discoverer, of someone for whom this way of seeing and working was new and fresh.
His style was imbued with unabashed emotion.
But in his work it also reflects the sense of someone who does not need to take easy paths, limit his inspiration or restrict it.
He opened his canvas to beauty with wonderful daring.
Just as he could calculate, he could also forget all calculations and let the image take flight.
His art has all the excitement and excitement of a beginning artist and all the dark, belated knowledge that, with little time left, he must risk everything to get it right.
Colm Tóibín
(Enniscorthy, Ireland, 1955) is a writer and essayist.
This excerpt is a preview of his book
From Him The Captivating Look.
Writings on art
, a set of texts written by the author and compiled by the Arcadia publishing house.
It is published, in Spanish and Catalan, this March 20.
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