Commentary
Some art has an urgency that marks it as an answer to a human call, a response that is both a moral imperative and a uniquely personal outpouring.
Lynne Dian Gulezian’s work has these qualities, reflecting her immersion in the lives of the people of South Africa over the past twenty-five years. Gulezian tells the stories of ordinary black and white citizens of a country that during that period passed from the oppression of apartheid, to political upheaval, to a new, still struggling social order. But her approach is not political, or sociological, rather she bears witness to the aspirations and suffering she saw in the lives of individuals that she encountered face-to-face. Gulezian’s own tale as an impassioned auditor of stories and creator of iconic images, is part of the drama played out in these works.
Gulezian’s collaged paintings do often have the quality of icons, in the sense that she paints people as emblematic in their dignity and their perseverance, celebrated by the artist’s focused attention. The alternating of real and stylized, of representational and abstract, is a recurring pulse in this work. It marks the work as expressive and driven rather than just documentary or depictive. The need to see and the need to say are equally honored in Gulezian’s images.
This need is evident in the collaged paper and other elements that give the works their tactile presence, entering into the viewer’s reality, instead of staying safely in their own aesthetic realm. And, this is clear in the poetic images that emerge in Gulezian’s work. This was apparent from the first piece of this ongoing series, Baby Crying Road, from more than ten years ago. In it is a woman, in the throes of the childbirth that would kill her, with her baby still in her womb, a red sprite dancing amongst lemons.
In another painting, a worker in the city in his blue uniform sits with his breakfast, an ordinary man except that he is a chief in his own village. In attendance are two silhouetted spirit guides protecting him. In a third work, the large, striated body of a man, striped like a jail cell, yet transparent, allows us to see the story of his escape from conscription by the Nazis, into the desert, which is transformed into a kind of magical peaceable kingdom.
This last image serves an exemplar for the dozens of other stories that Gulezian tells, of her own life and those of others, looking intently at the tragic as she does the joyful, allowing them to transform before her and our eyes. |
