Motion Sickness
Location and Working Hours
Bárbara de Braganza 9, Madrid. Open daily 11:00-19:00 Monday and Sunday Closed. Saturday until 2pm.Artists
Nicole Tijoux
Motion Sickness: Nicole Tijoux
Nicole Tijoux (Santiago, 1981) has spent decades painting water as a veil that disfigures bodies and objects, forcing us to wonder if there is an undistorted form of reality. The works in this exhibition remind us of the words of the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, for whom ‘nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see’.
At the end of the 19th century, the physicist Arthur Worthington took high-speed photographs of a drop of milk falling into a cup of tea. In the first photograph, a crater can be seen on the surface of the tea; in the second, the crater’s edges rise to form a crown; and, in the third, a column rises in the middle of the crater that has already vanished. Everything happens so fast that our perception cannot see each of these forms separately and puts them together in a single image as if they were arising simultaneously. The speed of our perception creates a distorted image of reality.
Nicole Tijoux explores this distortion. In her previous works, she painted bodies submerged in water in a hyperrealist style allowing us to appreciate the liquid forms of the figures. Tijoux created her works from photographs of swimming pools, some taken with the shutter wide open to increase the deformation. In those paintings, all that is solid melts into water. The British painter David Hockney, an early influence on Tijoux, was attracted to the way water disfigures the human body and considered depicting transparency a ‘nice problem’, a ‘graphic challenge’ that combined three planes in the same space: the waves and ripples that shape the transparency of water; the three-dimensional bodies in the depths, disfigured by refraction and the reflection of the exterior on the surface. Looking for the best way to represent water, Tijoux dissolved the oils with thinner and thus created a light and translucent paint, until she saw the works of Joaquín Sorolla and realized that water could be pastier, that it was possible to represent the liquid with matter.
On a symbolic level, water, in Tijoux’s work, brings together two Freudian drives. The body that floats weightlessly represents Eros, the drive towards life; however, the absence of solidity, the possibility of sinking, tempts our drive to reach the silence of death. This is what Tijoux experienced when a boat she was on capsized at sea. Falling into the water, Tijoux froze and began to sink. She looked up and saw the light moving away. She felt a strange serenity, as if she were a spectator of her own sinking, in silence, marveling at the fading light, until she finally reacted, swam to the surface, and felt terror at the proximity of death. How could the same event trigger such dissimilar experiences?
In the works of Motion Sickness, Tijoux takes the representation of an altered reality a step further by incorporating the mental distortions, the psychic filters that modify the perception of the world, those other veils that dye reality, like memories, desires and fears, daily subtle hallucinations, as if she was bringing to the canvas the Buddhist idea that the world is made by mind.
Half a century ago, French scientist Michel Jouvet came across the case of a young man who, due to a strange illness, couldn’t sleep for four months. He lived his day normally, but at nightfall, for a couple of hours, he confused the real world with the dream world. He heard voices, and saw images and people he could touch, but who were nevertheless coming out of his dreams. The mind creates a distorted image of reality.
In these works, Tijoux does not explore how water modifies the forms of what we observe, but how the observer distorts what he observes. Space-time loses its linearity and opens up to a multidimensional experience, in which the past merges with the present, and one place exists alongside another. In the work of Kenyan painter Michael Armitage, Tijoux found a way to address this new perception. Armitage’s paintings weave together multiple scenes drawn from his biography, from Kenyan history, from news media or advertising hoardings, and from distant times and places, all fused into one work.
Armitage’s plastic strategy for crossing different images gave Tijoux the key and, then, she devised a method to avoid getting lost in experimentation: she combined a fixed rule with chance. Without looking, she extracted different images from her photographic archive of swimming pools and her paintings, as if they were cards that conceal the destiny of a work. Then, facing the canvas, she applied the rule: three scenes and two perspectives. Each of these works combine three scenes from distant times and places, without overlapping, sharing two perspectives. She took the idea of joining a fixed structure with randomness from Mark Tansey, who, to overcome his creative blocks, designed a metaphor machine composed of three concentric wheels that could turn independently, carved on their edges with philosophical and metaphysical concepts that, combined randomly, generated new conceptual associations that he then painted and joined together using the same color as a monochromatic glue.
A structural rule governed by chance has allowed Tijoux to combine not only different periods but also a diversity of techniques: watercolors, flat paint and dense paint, various textures, collages of digital images with old paintings cut out, pasted, and then painted over. She needed to break away from the narrow palette of colors to which she had been subjected by the representation of the swimming pools she had been making for years. The spectrum of reds, relegated to the background, could now regain prominence
The result is a liquid figurative abstraction, as if the water had overflowed the pool, deforming the whole universe, as if we had been floating on the water for weeks, shaking, dizzy, and when we return to land, everything around us continues to shake. The works of Motion Sickness suggest that there is always a veil that shapes reality. For the poet Matsuo Basho poetry must be like a dewdrop in which the universe is reflected. For Tijoux, the universe does not exist outside that reflection.
Alan Meller