In the gallery Art XO Anna Heinrichson’s personal exhibition is on display When I die, I’ll be the air you breathe. This “blurred sentence” (AH) echoes Paul Kalanithi’s book When breath turns into air/When Breath Becomes Air name. The book about the last breath tells how to make life meaningful and continue in the face of death.
On both sides of the stage
The fatal point doesn’t sound nearly as cheerful or mildly enticing. In contrast to the era of laundry, when existential boundaries are strictly arranged, here one can feel a diffusely flowing desire to connect the unconnected. Given Anna Heinrichsson’s experience in creating scenography and costumes for countless theater productions, two ballets, as well as the dramatic legends of Hector Berlioz The destruction of Faust concert performance in Liepāja, it is necessary to recall her ability to melt into many characters and at the same time leave herself outside of the viewer’s perception. The artist skillfully introduces a good dose of romantic fantasy into rationalism. Romanticism, as we know, includes the cult of death. It was not for nothing that the legendary costume designer Večella Varslavāne considered the beautiful Anna Heinrichson with her artistic tribal patterns to be the successor of her work.
Even outside the stage, the inner landscape of the author is built on reversible relationships. This time with someone who isn’t. Or someone who doesn’t need anything from you, who doesn’t need you. Perhaps this someone has already died, leaving an unsolved puzzle, an unclosed gestalt, which provokes a repetition of the same situation, rotating in place.
“Looking for a way out of this situation, I dig deeper and deeper into the past. Not only my own, but the people I still feel the attraction of. Sometimes I feel like I’m looking at the landscape or a street corner with their eyes. I want to understand what they could have done and wanted to do to be aware of every moment that needs to be experienced. The more I look inside myself, the more clearly I see the dots that connect the matter of time distance. Everything is connected. Probably also in that infinity is full of lies, but I perceive them as mine, not from others,” writes Anna Heinrichsone in the annotation of the exhibition.
Loneliness row
The exhibition is introduced by four amateur photographs that “float” on the plane of the catwalk. During the development of 24 x 36 mm film, black and white images have dust clinging to them. When exposing the film to the photo paper, the image is enlarged and the details turn into white dots. The kind of loose blanket of snow that hides the sea kangaroos and the pine forest where the little girl, the grandpa and the boy are playing ball. The images are playful and happy, but when you try to see specific features, you see that the photos are melted in thick glass or maybe frozen in ice. Glass, ice and below them black chaotic streaks on a white plane stand in a long line of loneliness. Come and join as Hans Christian Andersen’s Kai, with a shard of glass in his eye, joined the Snow Queen’s carriage to try to make the word “eternity” out of ice cubes. It replaces the word “death” in the chilling tale.
Paintings analogous to photographs, four large-format canvases without subframes are arranged around the perimeter of the gallery. They, demonstrating a soft approximation, do not assert anything clearly and directly. The small pieces of glass/ice are dissolved like bouillon cubes in multi-layered glazes. The colors have condensed in clots or flowed in an arbitrary rhythm – vertical or horizontal. At the temperature of the melting of feelings, especially deep, clear and beautiful blue colors – cobalt and ultramarine – have blossomed. The blue is complemented by a complex green formed from emerald and olive green, probably some other color. It seems that this indiscriminate mixture of feelings is trying to keep the ebb and flow, the strategic retreat into the incomprehensible spread, at all costs. The need to dry each layer before moving on turns the painting process into a meditation. It has lasted half a year.
Looking at a block of four small-format paintings with a forest and gamblers, I thought of Kolka and the colors of the Livonian flag – blue, white and green. The structure of the visual elements is so organized. Such a peaceful, sheltered sanctuary.
The figures, detached from the photographs, still remain achromatic as shadows, and the only element that has acquired color, and that is red, is the ball. Having traveled from one canvas to another, the red dot becomes the unifying element that everyone strives to grasp. It is supposed that there, in the perfect form, is stored the whole, which is passed on to us for a short moment.
The Secret Reservoir
There is another object in the exhibition – a chair placed in front of the painting. Of course, you can sit in it. However, if we are dealing with Andras Freiberg’s scenography school, which is represented by Anna Heinrichson, one of the master’s small tasks should be mentioned – a chair in the room. In this case, the empty chair refers to the practice of open-ended Gestalt therapy. If in reality the conversation fails or is impossible at all, the chair helps to look at the absent person from the outside. It is a chair for the Imaginary with whom the relationship in the physical world has ended. The chair gives scale, helps to think concretely, to remember how a person is dressed, how he sits, how he observes, how he reacts. The chair is the equivalent of Jean Cocteau’s telephone.
Summing up the fragments of the exhibition as a whole, we see that the abundance of feelings in the paintings flows over the edges of being, tending to embrace the invisible person in the twilight. If he too cannot or does not want to want anything in his blindness, at least there is a possibility for the author to express his hidden experience. Look at it from a distance and make it a secret reservoir that you don’t drown in and that you can use when you need to get over the void.
If you manage to remember the puzzle… Maybe the audio collage of DJ Rihardas Bražinskis’ soundscape will help the audience to capture the emotional movement. But is it necessary? In art, the roller coaster ride of feelings can be very fruitful. Anxieties and neuroses feed well here, and all their girlfriends. You may not need to go out at all. Maybe a loss is a gain, who knows.
Anna Heinrihsone
Exhibition When I die, I’ll be the air you breathe
In the gallery Art XO until 25.XI
2023-11-24 13:59:11
#breath #Review #Anna #Heinrichsons #exhibition
