By Eder Chiodetto

 

Pictures invite the eye not to rush along, but to rest a while and dwell with them in enjoyment of their revelation.

The Mythic Image, Joseph Campbell

 

Standing before a large tree whose flowery top loomed majestically in the landscape, Ana Nitzan was brought to a moment of reflection on her place in the world, the limitations of the human being in relation to nature and, consequently, the evident powerlessness of photography in the attempt to faithfully depict this sight.

This founding instant of a thought can be understood as a cathartic moment in an artist’s creative process, which will give rise to an artwork. It is when the outer world touches and turns the gears of art’s process of becoming, the point where the artist feels the call to wander through its labyrinths, among uncertainties, intuitions, experiments and chance occurrences, until finding the most genuine way of representing a certain state of things.

“Upon observing that tree, I felt small before the monumental grandiosity of nature. To register it, I lay down on the ground, as in a posture of reverence. I thus photographed it from two different angles, leaving the horizon line like a thin thread, to remember our smallness in relation to all of this,” the artist says.

Back in her studio, when analyzing the images she had captured, she observed the two faces side-by-side. Surprise. Upon joining the faces, the trees arose without a trunk, without contact with the soil. It was as though they were flying.

By photographing the two sides of the same treetop, in the attempt to force the limits of photography to allude to the tridimensionality of the referent, the artist serendipitously created the illusion of levitation. Could it be that this image was the poetic translation of the amazement she had felt when she had come upon the tree in the field? It would seem so. But it lacked an element that would restore the tree’s volume, contours and thickness. The line.

“In various objects that I develop, I use the line, whether it be the line of drawing, or the line – the thread – of sewing. In both cases it connects ideas, concepts. It unites the worlds of drawing and photographic instruction. The line of drawing is the same one that sews the landscapes lost in time. The line knits up the weave of childhood unraveled by the trauma of life,” the artist says.

Sewing the two faces of the tree on the back of the photographic paper and opening it, like a book – a metaphor of the source of knowledge – Ana Nitzan was able to join the aesthetic and conceptual points which interlace the poetic and philosophical questions that arose in her at that first moment she was beholding the tree in the field.

This image-upheaval organically summarizes the vital cycles, transcendence, spirituality. At the same time, it poetically speculates on the limits of representation, of our visual perception, of our gaze toward our surroundings.

We must investigate the tree’s symbolic power in this circuit of reverberations between the sensorial process and the aesthetic rapture brought on by the images of Sublimação [Sublimation]. The Dicionário dos símbolos, (1) a reference adopted by the artist in her researches, summarizes the meanings of the tree for her:

 A living cosmos in perpetual regeneration […] A symbol of life in constant evolution and ascension toward the sky, the tree evokes all of the symbolism of verticality: see, for example, the tree of Leonardo da Vinci. On the other hand, it also serves to symbolize the cyclical aspect of cosmic evolution: death and regeneration. The leafy ones especially evoke a cycle, since they lose their leaves and then get them back every year.

 The tree puts the three levels of the cosmos into communication: the underground world, through its roots always exploring the depths where they are buried; the earth’s surface, through its trunk and lower branches; the heights, through its upper branches and its top, attracted to the light of the sky. Reptiles crawl through its roots, birds move through its branches; it thus establishes a relationship between the Chthonian world and the Uranian world.

(1) Dicionário de símbolos, Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant – published by Editora Jose Olympio (2012)

 

Studio-nest-labyrinth

Ana Nitzan is an artist who collects worlds, who organizes archives. At her studio in São Paulo, which she haunts with all the frequency of a dedicated staff member, she is surrounded by the materials that drive her. It is her nest and her labyrinth, where getting lost and finding herself are not necessarily opposing ideas.

Ana Nitzan’s work is developed in spirals in which her experience with nature, the relation with her family, her readings and trips, photography, objects, drawings and sewings are linked by a curious and investigative worldview shot through by metaphysical questionings. She is interested in the enigmas that perplex the human being in its deepest and most disquieting questions about existence, its vulnerability, the awareness of finitude, the desire for transcendence, the perception of these states in the cycles of nature. “I seek the answers… I like to give some meaning to the apparently inexplicable. Art is a good place to speculate on that,” she says.

In order to best show the researches that Ana Nitzan carries out in her studio, to convey the breadth and coherence of the horizon of possibilities that she convokes, we have created notebooks with drawings, objects, collages, and a myriad of notes.

In this way we have sought to make it possible for the viewer to walk between the gaps of the artist’s images and her imaginary, to connect the dots of her creative process and to enter this delicate territory, which is also the place of fierce struggles in search of a legitimate expression.

In the world of these trees that reach up and symbolize lightness there are polarities that constantly confront us. As stated by Gaston Bachelard, “There is no straying, loose good; there is no flower without the dirty work of the earth. Good sprouts from evil.” Or, as Ana Nitzan’s grandmother philosophized among pots and pans: “My daughter, trees do not grow up to the sky.”

 

Acknowledgments

Cecilia Isnard, Eder Chiodetto, Juliana Zola, Pietro Ghiurghi, Milena Galli, LetiÅLcia Coelho, Aleide Alves and team.

To all my family and friends, especially my companion Jorge.

To my mother and to the memory of my grandparents and my father, who left me this marvelous earth to take care of.

I am especially grateful to BES.

 

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