Irma Grizá, among her unfolded landscapes by Alberto Ruy Sánchez

Featuring palm trees and the sea – or cats and a wheat field - the paintings of Irma Grizá share a force that not only lies in the themes she develops, but in the vision they offer us as well. An ancient Chinese legend seems appropriate to understanding where Irma Grizá’s unfolded landscapes lead us. The legend tells of a painter who spent his life traveling great distances in search of a landscape he had seen in his dreams. With the help of his excellent visual memory, each time he tried rendering that landscape on paper, he would always feel profoundly dissatisfied. No image traced by his hand was able to produce the marvelous sensation he had experienced in his dreams. Something crucial was missing yet he was uncertain of what it was. In the meanwhile, the notes he threw aside on the road were saved by his disciples and sold at extremely high prices. These were imitated so often in fact that once he was even accused of plagiarizing one of his disciples that copied him. Ignoring all this –in as much as it was possible- the painter continued on his search. He learned, however, not to discard his drawings, nor to leave them where they might be seen by his followers. He guarded them carefully in every way possible. Many years later, when he was almost certain that all his efforts had been useless, at the point of resigning himself to the fact that he would never find his landscape, he decided to burn all his notes, sketches and drawings. He piled all his papers together and, as he unfolded some, which he had carried with him for years, he realized that the folds in the paper overlapped with his lines and that this irruption added a kind of vibration to his drawings, which they had never revealed before. His unfolded landscape was the landscape of his dreams. He realized that as much as he may have traveled, he would never have found it and that, indeed, he had carried it with him for years without even having realized it.

As in the papers of the Chinese painter, one of the most remarkable features in the recent work of Irma Grizá is an effect of unfolding which indicates a visual rupture. As if these landscapes stood before us through a large window; as if they had suffered, to our eyes, a small deformation, precisely in that place where the two windowpanes are joined.

This effect of an unfolded landscape –of a momentarily interrupted contemplation in order to recuperate its ability to call our attention to a higher level- has various aesthetic implications: one of which is to remind us that what we are seeing is a representation. That is, that we are not facing a landscape, but rather the image of a landscape. Thus, at first Irma Grizá shows us that we do not hear the wind of the field we see; instead we hear a song. We are facing a composition to be observed. Not Nature but Art. Not the thing painted, but its double acting on the natural stage of painting, the festive margins of a canvas.

At first, “unfolded landscape” signifies a visual canto to the immense possibilities of plastic representations. As if, suddenly, that rite of contemporary art history were performed once again; a rite that each artist undertakes in his own way; as if those chains were suddenly broken which had previously obligated the artist to paint things so as to make us believe they were painted as they actually are. Free of such documentary fidelity, the artist enters a new dimension of fidelity to herself and to the possibilities of her art.

She is suddenly faithful to the visual powers that she convokes. And those of us who see her canvases are the spectators of her act, the guests invited to witness (in the scene of the unfolding landscapes) the proof that our gaze can see more than what meets the eye; thanks to the artist who reveals it to us.

Moments afterward, “unfolded landscape” might signify a visual canto in which we notice the emotional intermittencies of the painter and the viewer. A sort of modern visual recuperation of German Romantic songs from previous centuries, those Lieder in which the intermittencies of the heart emerge in subtle, caustic expressions. In this way Irma Grizá addresses (employing a new language in her paintings) the most profound challenge of those who have cultivated the tradition of landscape painting over the course of the years: the challenge of transforming that external vision of Nature into a landscape of the soul. The challenge of painting herself, in a subtle, measured way, ciphered in the intensity of her colors more than in her subjects, and of also forcing us to recognize ourselves in her work –similarly intermittent and silent.

One of those old German songs referred to a folded cloth, and to the relationship established between sentiment and the traces within the fold:

Upon unfolding my handkerchief, Something inside Escaped and flew away. Now I have to look at everything Through the folds of the cloth That one day the wind Unfolded in me.

Recalling this song, we may notice a similarity regarding the effect of the unfolded landscape in the canvases of Irma Grizá. The fold is an opening in the soul, an entrance inside, but also a scar that reminds us of pain, or joy.

At any rate, in the work of Irma Grizá the fold is also a boundary between two visual zones. Thus we enter into the third meaning of the effect of unfolding in these paintings: the unfolded landscapes reveal the borderline coexistence regarding different zones of emotion. These are palpable works about the emotive alternation that we all live. In its patchwork, that is a work whose harmony is composed by diverse parts or patches, the unfolded landscapes constitute a profound artistic continuity of what is apparently discontinuous, a composition of initially isolated forces. Thus, these unfolded landscapes are naturally suited to create diptychs and triptychs.

Employing a different language, another painter who explored this visual notion (of varying emotional zones that coexist in a composition) is the French painter Nicolas de Stäel. After his death, his correspondence and notebooks were published, filled with revealing commentaries regarding his work. In one of these he spoke precisely of this emotive alternation that he saw in landscapes and which he tried to render in his drawings: “Between serenity and silence, a minute of fear and another of calm, but what is amazing is the whole, which is always unique.”

And posed with the question as to the reason behind that emotive intermittency that he made visual, Nicolas de Stäel formulates an answer that could also be valid regarding the unfolded landscapes of Irma Grizá: “because in the end it is very easy, believe me… to breathe, to breathe. And never to think in the definitive without considering the ephemeral.” In this way, a fourth meaning emerges regarding these unfolded landscapes: they are passionate works but never entirely innocent. This is the work of a painter immersed in the sea that she paints but always aware of the distance that separates her from things. The tropical paradise she paints is a dream. She knows this and paints it as a grand dream of passionate forms. Her lack of innocence admittedly makes us most certainly accomplices in her enthusiastic re-creation, because hers is not a blind enthusiasm. Her unfolded landscapes reveal an incredible tension between lucidity and fascination. In her work –and her canvases constantly remind us- Irma Grizá is moved by an incredible concentration of forces that she has convoked, reactivating in her brushwork the intensity of what is experienced. And as if those forces she convokes and show us needed to be tamed, gradually contained, or more precisely rhythmed, Irma Grizá breaks the continuity of our vision, breaks the line of the horizons and rhythmically detains the flight of our gaze.

Instead of the impatience of the precipice, the unfolded landscapes offer us the joy of slow flight. A fluttering that is a dance of the gaze and no longer a free fall. And behind that dance is the fifth meaning of these landscapes: their joy as an extensive backdrop. The very same Nicolas de Stäel, when discussing his visits to certain museums, was impressed by a common background in those painters he recognized as suicidal, self-tortured, mad, seriously ill: a backdrop of death. De Stäel –whose life would abruptly end at the age of 41-, knew what he was talking about. In the paintings of Irma Grizá, on the contrary, a backdrop of life can be breathed. Her landscapes are inevitably definitions of an attitude with regard to art, but also an attitude with regard to life, to live life in spite of its setbacks or rather, with them. To take advantage of the fact that sensibility has the privilege of making art out of anything in life –trivial or unusual, a cat scarcely discernible among pitchers and pots, a sovereign palm tree, a burnt field, a window that opens out onto the sea, a motif of happiness and the interruption of that joy: everything is contained in a folded landscape; everything is an aesthetic and vital affirmation.

If Monet was able to affirm that he didn’t paint what was there but what he saw at different hours of the day: his impressions; and if, many years later, Nicolas de Stäel said that one doesn’t paint what is seen, nor the impression that one has of things, but rather the impact one receives from them, then facing the unfolded landscapes of Irma Grizá one can say that she neither paints the impression nor the impact of what she observes –but rather, in an evident way, she paints the vital ardor with which she sees.

Thus making vital ardor out of what was impact and impression, the landscapes of Irma Grizá open their perspective to the very history of painting. Thus, the final meaning of these paintings: these unfolded landscapes are a synthesis, an acting definition, compression and contemporary door to an entire region of painting. They lie on that taut wire on which currents flow.

Translated by Roberto Tejada