The fleeting is essential to the eye. Contemporary aesthetic processes and experiences.
Dialogue with the artist Rasia Friedler about the exhibition "Lives in Transit".
By Eugenia Grau
Seeing and observing the plastic work of Rasia Friedler was personally a humanist, anthropocentric adventure.
Her poetic and profound view of human beings ranges from her profession as a psychologist to the artistic one that inhabits her and vice versa.
In this multiplicity of languages converge interests of long investigative reflection, always provoked by emotion and creative passion.
In his artistic proposal he stops the instant and the action, generating series where texts and figures intertwine.
In this way, he reveals the loving strangeness that the bodies and their evolution provoke in him, all in their possible circumstances, to illuminate new gazes that in turn question us.as
-What is "Lives in Transit" about?
"Lives in transit" is an invitation to a visual journey through public spaces that seeks to avoid the saturation of images and the fatigue of the daily hustle and bustle.
It consists of a series of visual works that refer to itineraries, journeys, displacements, human wanderings through places of flux, waiting areas, neighbourhood localities, with special attention to mobility and small everyday gestures. It also alludes to imaginaries, dreams, conflicts and fears in contemporary cities.
In addition to the above, "Lives in Transit" connotes the passage of time, the transit of life and the importance of capturing a fleeting moment in the life of any person in order to turn it into an enduring aesthetic fact.
Each work is part of a larger narrative that alludes to the life experiences of the inhabitants. In the city, the stories overlap and intertwine, imprinting their own emotionality.
I am particularly attracted to the relationship between visual language and literary language, so seeing anonymous subjects in motion is a great spur to my imagination.
I tend to observe everyday urban scenes with meticulousness, like a living text with multiple planes and dimensions. That is the origin of these collected works of art.
-What drives you towards creation?
-I couldn't say precisely, as there is always something unconscious in the creative impulse, but I feel a strong need to delve into the mystery of human existence. I try to capture the beauty I perceive in what surrounds me, or what I would like to find.
Basically, I seek to establish a more intimate and sensitive relationship with the world. Nothing human is alien to me.
I live in a process of continuous change involving observation, curiosity, research, experimentation, that is, everything that involves feeling/seeing/thinking the uncertain world in which we live.
The smallest acts of everyday life, a passer-by's journey through public space, random connections, everything can be a trigger to investigate, experiment, create. The fleeting is essential to the eye.
I approach painting with a gaze traversed by my photographic experience and vice versa. I focus on issues that concern contemporaneity.
I also like to decontextualise and re-signify the objects I use on a daily basis. To generate new meaning-producing associations, to travel new or less travelled paths. To build and provide iconic constructions that allow new perspectives. In short, to recover the depth of the gaze.
I believe that sensitivity, the continuous willingness to reinvent oneself and to renew the gaze are the touchstone of art.
Fortunately, mystery and beauty never leave us.
-What criteria do you use to choose the techniques you use?
My choice is based on what inspires me in the work, on the subject and on some practical aspects such as the place and the materials I have to work with, the drying time, the ease of use or the size of the painting.
I try to approach reality without a rigid prior framework, with a broad conceptual battery that allows me to have the most appropriate techniques for each work.
The techniques can be conventional or unconventional, as can the spaces for intervention and exhibition of the works.
Images have taken on an unprecedented relevance in this era. Therefore, moving from one technique to another, or from the tangible to the intangible and vice versa, are ways of exploring the articulations between images and visuality, their dialogues and tensions.
The boundaries between techniques, between art and life, between creator and spectator, between one subject and another, have become blurred.
Contemporary art has expanded and the multiplicity of resources I use is a way of dealing with the complexity in which we live.
-How does the technique intertwine with the subject of the work?
Sometimes I try to give form to an idea, other times the form suggests it to me, giving rise to new compositional strategies. During the creative process there is a dialogue between materiality and concept, between idea and device.
An inexhaustible variety of possibilities emerges from the mixture of painting with other arts.
I am interested in the process beyond the work itself, as there is a dialogue between the subject and the technique. There is a connection between different artistic languages and techniques.
The interweaving of languages and resources from different disciplines offers enormous possibilities for innovation. It is precisely the interaction of diverse aesthetic elements that produces mutual feedback. Any subject or material can become art through an investigative-creative process.
My exploration includes collage, drawing, painting, photography and digital art. I tend to use mixed media with an experimental approach. Since the materials are linked to their social use, I also seek to relate them to the context of the work.
-What is your favourite palette?
I like greens, blues, greys and browns, although I go through different colour phases. I don't stick to a single palette, but I have a predilection for sobriety.
On some occasions I have used fluorescent colours when the work suggested it.
In contemporary art there is a lot of freedom. Colours do not obey fixed connotations.
Technique and colour depend on the particularities of each visual construction, on the multiple aspects of the work.
-What questions are at the heart of this exhibition?
The implicit questions are multiple, since they arise fundamentally from the interpretation of the spectators.
Through the works I try to suggest rather than show. To let something minimal and fleeting be seen in order to leave room for the viewer's imagination.
I am attracted to the subtle, the ambiguous, the secret, the mysterious, the contradictory, the vulnerable, the ineffable and the elusive of human subjectivity.
I am intrigued by the silent and the silenced, by what time produces in bodies and matter, by the flight from the tangible to the virtual world, by the alienation of the human being made strange to himself and to his fellow human beings.
Some of the questions that these works suggest to me are skate culture, the strangeness of the passing of time, the "obsolescence" of human beings in the face of technological acceleration, the deepening of the generation gap in the digital era, the processes of urban reconfiguration that deepen social inequalities, precarious work, mass loneliness, etc. In short, the challenges that we face at the "glocal" level are all over the works.
How is your life reflected in your work?
I think that in this incessant aesthetic exploration there is a yearning for self-discovery, something like "tell me what you create and I'll tell you who you are".
My own life has been marked by multiculturalism and displacement.
I was born in Israel, I am the daughter of an Austrian father and an Uruguayan mother, I have lived in Germany, in England, in Brazil and I live in Uruguay.
Uncertainty, nomadism and fluidity, traits that characterise my life, are also dominant features of our time.
Everything I experience unsettles me and drives me towards creation, which always verges in some way on the autobiographical.I feel a strong need to understand, to delve into the meaning of this life which I absorb avidly and which at the same time escapes me.
This is how my life is interwoven with art, conceived as a territory of freedom and resilience.
In these turbulent times, I oscillate between gratitude and dazzlement, between shock and awe. I live in a state of wonder and alertness. I pay close attention to details, to nuances, to the pauses and tensions between words and actions, waiting for the tiniest revelation, for a meaning hidden beneath the obvious. I also tend to take a nostalgic look at certain routines, values and ways of life present in a past world that has almost vanished.
I like to scrutinise human facts and motivations.
Finally, creating is a way of dealing with the vulnerability intrinsic to my human condition and of conceiving other possible worlds.
-What are your main artistic influences?
My influences are manifold and come from various disciplines.
To name a few, I love Hopper's intimacy, the human figures that appear in rooms without curtains, the contrast between light and darkness, the possibility of condensing every story in a single image.
I came to collage in an autodidactic way, inspired by the work of Vik Muniz, an artist I deeply admire.
For the last 5 years I have been attending the workshop of Fernando Oliveri, an outstanding Uruguayan painter dedicated to magical realism, which at times tends to hyperrealism, whose teaching I treasure.
In addition, as a psychologist and artist, I have been practising Spontaneous Theatre for more than two decades. Its participatory philosophy and methodology permeate my artistic work beyond the theatre, which is why I tend to think of the work as an experience capable of generating bonds, emotions, stories, and not just as the end of a process,
In general I am attracted by the absence of unnecessary elements, by the simplicity of minimalism.
In this age saturated with images, where overabundance makes them invisible, I want to give them a new visibility. To rekindle the poetic flame to celebrate the unrepeatable miracle of being alive and to illuminate paths of hope.
Montevideo, April 2022
