Opening on Saturday June 13 from 3 to 8 pm
Curated by Manuel Neves
For the second time, Rita Fischer presents her works at Xippas Paris, with a variety of supports and materials: egg tempera on canvas or wooden panels, as well as watercolor on paper.
This exhibition features a new series of vertically formatted works. Although the artist continues to create horizontal pieces, in recent years she has been experimenting with this new format, which further intensifies the visual ambiguity conveyed by her paintings and their possible relationship to the tradition of landscape painting.
In the academic tradition, largely shaped by the work of Nicolas Poussin, the landscape genre is fundamentally associated with horizontality. However, several emblematic vertical-format examples exist, among them the remarkable series of three paintings produced in 1818 by Théodore Géricault: “Paysage au tombeau, le midi“, “Paysage héroïque avec des pêcheurs“, and “Le Soir, paysage avec un aqueduc”.
While in these large-scale paintings the artist presents different moments of the day as metaphors for human becoming, a dark atmosphere – foretelling the imminent arrival of a storm – seems to run through and connect the three works.
The format of these paintings and the tension-filled atmosphere they project establish a subtle dialogue with Rita Fischer’s abstract landscapes.
Likewise, although the artist’s paintings resist any obvious classification, they project the sensation of succeeding one another or becoming linked together, conveying an aesthetic (Beaty), a harmony, and a recognizable, defined style.
Nevertheless, if we closely observe the cartography of each painting and its complex structure, nothing seems to repeat itself or continue from one work to another.
In this sense, Rita Fischer seeks, in some way, to reveal the ambiguity and near impossibility of putting into practice the concept of the Diagram, as defined by Gilles Deleuze, with which she is deeply familiar.
In a series of lectures delivered toward the end of his life, the French philosopher sought to reflect upon the act of painting, taking as his point of reference certain ideas of Paul Klee and especially Paul Cézanne.
Deleuze contrasts two dimensions within the pictorial act : the cliché and its opposite, the diagram.
The cliché or clichés are the themes, ideas, narratives, and possibilities the artist possesses before beginning to paint. For the philosopher, the canvas is never truly blank because, before approaching it, the artist is already inhabited by clichés. Thus, for the pictorial act to emerge, one must pass through catastrophe and chaos so that, through the diagram – a kind of cleansing of clichés – the pictorial may come into being.
In this sense, for Deleuze the act of painting unfolds in three moments: the pre-pictorial, defined by the cliché; the diagram, defined by catastrophe, which would constitue the cleansing of or struggle against those clichés; and finally, the pictorial fact itself, determined by the intrinsic necessities of painting.
For Rita Fischer, articulating the diagram in each new work is almost unattainable, because her practice seeks to project a distinctive style – one that is, in some way, inhabited by cliché. Yet this recognizable style manifests itself only in the overall appearance of her paintings.
If we carefully observe each of her paintings, they are composed of hundreds of micro pictorial events that are unique and irreproducible. It is within these micro pictorial spaces that the artist rehearses the utopia of the diagram.
Rita Fischer places the relationship between cliché and diagram under tension, treating them as interdependent concepts that coexist in permanent friction.
Her works thus remain suspended within an abyss – that is, within an unlimited depth of possibilities, within an endless evocation where image and representation are traversed by an enduring storm.
Manuel Neves
