Mariana Sissia

The map and the territory

By Nova Benway

Hamlet points to the sky and turns to Polonius. “Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in the shape of a camel?” Polonius, who has come in the service of the court to persuade the errant young man to visit his mother, the queen—follows the prince’s gaze. “By th’ mass, and ’tis like a camel indeed”, he answers obligingly. But Hamlet is unsatisfied, and draws the courtier further into his sky-gazing reverie. “Methinks it is backed like a weasel”, he counters. “It is backed like a weasel”, comes the somewhat impatient reply. But the prince isn’t through yet: “Or like a whale”, he persists. He is really testing the limits now, but the unimaginative, decidedly practical Polonius has no way of extricating himself from the banter; his courtly role forces him to be perennially agreeable: “Very like a whale”, is the only reply he can meekly proffer. Just when it seems the prince could play puppet master with the foolish old servant for as long as he likes, he abruptly ends the game: “Then I will come to my mother by and by”. What is taking place during this brief interlude? Is Hamlet truly invested in this idle whimsy? Is he delaying the inevitable responsibility for avenging his father’s death with a few moments of childlike daydreaming? Is this one of the first indications that he is descending into genuine madness? Or is he simply stringing Polonius along, distracting him from his intended task? Perhaps, in this moment, Hamlet understands that the ability to free associate, to call to consciousness things that aren’t there, to interpret and interpolate one’s own perspective into the crude material of everyday life, is a way of retaining his humanity within the sinister chaos of the court. It is in these seemingly whimsical moments that the seeds of his later actions —both tragic and noble— are planted. In the drawings of Mariana Sissia, the raw material of graphite and paper are used to explore the nature of thinking and acting. While the process of thinking tends to be understood as always and only internal, separate from action that takes place in the world, Sissia uses the drawn mark to merge a psychological experience with a physical one. Like Hamlet, she brings a new reality into being. And, like those of Hamlet, her visions are fleeting and personal, and they escape interpretation: their effect is cumulative, rather than linear. They do not resolve into narrative so much as they evoke dozens of narratives, natural and historical, aesthetic and social. Sissia calls them “Mental Landscapes”, suggesting that the mind is as rich a territory as any tangible one, and inviting the question: where does a map of the mind lead us? LANDSCAPES
Sissia has described her process as a kind of introspective detective work, in which she reveals the inner workings of her mind through the meditative use of frottage on paper. These rubbings, by their very nature simultaneously controlled and freeform, evoke an incredible array of thoughts and images. As the artist told me:

I don’t have a plan before I start or, rather, the plan is not to have a plan ... to let [the drawing] take shape through the trace that the frottage leaves on the paper. On the basis of intuition, I decide which surface on which to rub the paper, the exact location on which to do the frottage, the blank spaces to be left, and how to interpret it. I conceive as a “script” that takes shape at random, one that I interpret according to my emotional state.

Yet for all the introspection and delicate meditation of these drawings, Sissia also evokes the astonishing variety of the natural world. Blooming flowers, volcanic eruptions, wet rocks in a stream, conifers fluorishing on a mountain’s face —the spread and expansion of these natural textures form a kind of unresolved landscape that floats transiently through the viewer’s consciousness. This thoughtful attention to landscape as mental space shouldn’t be surprising, since two of Sissia’s often-named influences are the Romantic painters Caspar David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner, who both imbued pictorial representations of landscape with complex psychological resonance. Sissia shares their approach to the sublime, which suffuses the beautiful with an overwhelming sense of awe. She employs variously repeating elements that transform without pause from the delicately decorative —flowery shapes patterned on wallpaper— to the voraciously unyielding, as volcanic ash washes over the ground, subsuming everything in its path. The relationship between surface and ground in these works is complicated by Sissia’s manipulations of the paper, which is built up with crabbed pencil lines that recall the knobbly trunks of trees, while in other places rubbed smooth like a pebble in the sea. When a gap in the drawing appears —the pencil thinning out to reveal the paper substrate— is the viewer descending into a formless abyss, or is it only the sun breaking through a cloudy sky? We imagine we can press our face against the soft fur of an animal that seems to appear in one densely layered thatch of lines, when the next moment this comfort falls away, to be replaced by the dizzying vertigo of a high aerial perspective. The environment is totalizing, and we cannot tell whether we are looking at a surface in front of us, as with a wall, or from above, as with a sweeping bird’s eye view. As the scales shift and worlds large and small rise and fall before our eyes on the paper, the artist complicates our notion of the line between the active experience of being in the world, and the aesthetic experience that takes place for the viewer of drawing. Sissia’s technique suggests an introspective response to the Action painters of the mid-twentieth century, who emphasized the relationship between the physical process of making the work, and its physical presence in its finished form. Like Sissia, these painters sought ways to surround themselves with their work during its making. Yet in contrast to the extreme drama of certain gestural abstraction, her work is human scale. Again, the active and meditative converge in the drawings: Sissia has said she sees each drawing as “the mantra I repeat in order to reach a certain state. When my breathing has quieted and my mind goes blank, the drawing takes shape and expands like an organic substance.” Even as we explore this complex environment with an intrepid sense of adventure, we are drawn into a more psychological reading of the landscape as well. Delicate fingers seem to have left their prints in a thousand places over the surface of each drawing, but how do we read the evidence they’ve left behind? Likewise, the confluence of shape and texture that occasionally resolves itself into a meticulous, handmade Rorschach test: with a sly hand, Sissia creates confusion between the random associative meaning of the inkblot with the carefully articulated visual significance assigned by an artisan. The raw materials of the world brim over with meaning, cultural, spiritual, and personal: pools of water coalesce into figures, smeared windows seem to suddenly reveal the handprint of Jesus. The surfaces of Sissia’s drawings seem to be the perfect reflection of a hundred forms of significance. Every day, our surroundings seem to ask us: What do you see? What does it tell you? How do you read it? Sissia seems to suggest that in these drawings, such contemplation is shared: she invites us into the stream of her consciousness, made visible by mark and texture. Like Hamlet, we watch the clouds go by, grasping at any meaning they might offer us before they disappear from sight; recognizing that it may all be an apparition produced by an active mind, but is no less significant for that. MOVEMENT
Recently, Sissia has begun hanging her drawings in the middle of the gallery, allowing them to drape across empty space. As their intricate surfaces become voluminous, their stillness is occasionally disrupted: the drawings sway and bow when a visitor enters the room. While this movement does relate to certain forms of kinetic art, the drawings seem less independent than many of those works, more responsive to human activity. The more crowded a space, the more they move, creating the pleasant illusion that the drawings are social—excited by human presence. The literal movement in the room pleasantly echoes the implied, metaphorical movement of the forms on the page. As they occupy the space with their twisting and leaning, the drawings’ fragility is revealed as a kind of muscular strength. They remind the viewer of a dancer’s body: the simplest movement can carry extreme power when it combines subtlety with absolute control. As with a skilled performer’s sweeping foot or curving wrist, each drawing seems to call up profound significance from extreme economy of means. Sissia cleverly uses the vacuum-like space of the gallery to remind the visitor that, even in a seemingly void-like space, there is constant activity and motion. A primary way she achieves this is through the boldness of size: her drawings billow and sweep like waves across the gallery. Sissia doesn’t think of this method of installing the work as performance, however; rather, it activates latent qualities in the drawings themselves. The surface of each drawing is such a light and deft exploration of the intersection between void and matter that Sissia’s placement of them in space feels particularly intelligent: they are constituted by air, so air is easily felt to be integral to one’s experience of them. HISTORY
Because Sissia’s work presents an idiosyncratic and singular vision, it is perhaps no surprise that her influences are eclectic and far-reaching. The depth of her knowledge of Western art history is expressed in ways both rigorous and playful, as evidenced by her references to kinetic art and landscape painting, already mentioned. However, one can situate her drawings within a number of traditions that predate the more circumscribed boundaries of modern art movements, including tapestry, Asian scroll paintings, and cave painting. Each of these has a long and complex history, and Sissia’s engagement with them is an indication of the depth and breadth of her project. Scroll paintings differ from most Western painting in the way that the viewer encounters them: while the latter are viewed at a distance, the former have historically been encountered close-up, at an individualized pace, as the viewer unrolls the piece him or herself. Often, scroll paintings are not made with the expectation that they will be viewed as a whole; rather, one appreciates them in stages as they are rolled and unrolled. One of the most striking qualities of such works is the elastic- ity of time: the phases of life of a warrior might be represented on a single sheet of parchment, depicting, for example, the young boy at his lessons jostling against his older self in the midst of combat on the battlefield. Sissia plays with this elasticity in her own way, as her abstract forms take shape and disappear, one after another, on an endless stage. Like traditional scroll painters, Sissia places a clear importance on format —the long, narrow sheets of thin, translucent paper— that is absent from Western drawing and painting, in which the rectangle or square is the default for most artists. Her use of rice paper underscores her debt to the scroll painting form. Sissia responds to this tradition in the making of her work as well: she has said that she starts each day on a new section of her drawing without looking back at her previous efforts, and often does not even view her larger drawings as a whole until the day of the exhibition opening. Le Corbusier famously called tapestries “nomadic murals,” and for Sissia, who has referred to her own drawings as “conceptual architecture,” the confluence of the concrete and the ephemeral holds an evident appeal. As an ancient art form, tapestries were valued for their ability to depict grand scenes of religious, military or royal significance, while remaining easily portable, as they could be rolled up and transported as needed. Their simple, repetitive forms flirt with the decorative and domestic while conveying myths and history on epic scale. Indeed, as Sissia’s rice paper surfaces float in the breeze, one begins to liken them to coats of arms, or delicate, drooping flags. At first their fragility seems to undermine their impressiveness, but then the viewer quickly realizes that all flags are made to move: unlike a stamp or a printed sign, flags gain their power from their visible motion, as they flutter and sway above capital domes or from the masts of ships. No matter how full of life and motion they are, they remain persistently in the realm of representation, never quite becoming “real.” It is this combination that is perhaps most intriguing: Sissia’s images, in their size and scope, demand attention and invite reflection, but they are also grey, blurred and inconclusive, and they raise more questions than they answer. There is a humor in Sissia’s insistence that her quiet, subtle forms be presented as unavoidable, unapologetic, even bombastic. There is something ceremonial about them, and they convey a tentative pride as they festoon the space, lending a sense of simultaneous solemnity and celebration. But what small nation do they represent? In the name of what humble people are these banners raised? Unlike tapestry, in Sissia’s cosmology, myths and histories are more evocative for their lack of specificity. Her work does not actually depict legible narratives, any more than they function as real architecture. If any signs or symbols are present, they should be read in a way akin to constellations, to be regarded with the same combination of significance and mystery which humans have sought and found in the stars for thousands of years. Finally, Sissia’s drawings call to mind the most ancient drawings we know of—those found in caves dating from prehistoric times. One can easily imagine a horse or elk or spear-wielding hunter taking shape out of the grey tangle of graphite contours and furrows. It is thought that cave painting was a ritualistic practice: hunters depicted animals in order to conjure a more successful future hunt, while shamans adorned cave walls in the hopes of drawing out their power. Sissia’s meditative technique echoes this sense of drawing as spiritual. Her drawings also recall the strange placelessness of cave art: on the dark walls, animals and symbols float in a groundless space, detached from any sense of time or location. Imagining Sissia’s drawing on a wall in Lascaux, though, the viewer would find it difficult to say where the drawing ends and the stone surface of the cave begins. Imagined inside a cave, the blemishes on the wall would become part of the image; the patterns on each animal’s skin would blend with erosions and patches of dirt. The scrapes and abrasions in the paper caused by Sissia’s frottage technique even, in places, call to mind the direct intervention, the scratching or clawing, of living creatures. Every mark is also a rubbing, an incising, into the page; surface and substrate are inextricably linked. Like an archeologist, Sissia is excavating as much as she is drawing. Why does Sissia draw? This most basic of questions leads to perhaps the most provocative exploration of the significance behind her work. Though many of her influences are to be found in painting, she emphatically grounds her work in the medium of drawing. What compels, again and again, her use of the pencil in so many permutations? Drawing is of- ten described as a kind of thinking: it is raw and direct, relatively unmediated in its relation between marking tool and substrate. Indeed, Sissia has said she does not use color in her drawings because she feels it will get in the way of the pure sense of gesture she is attempting to convey. The history of drawing is that of exploration and observation: drawings are used to articulate what the draftsman sees. The drafstman is an inventor whose every decision is visible in the final product, as a form of visual thinking, existing in the present tense, and always full of the potential for further embellishment. Sissia frustrates this expectation: her use of frottage is both evidence of her hand and its effacement; the technique creates a tension between the presence and absence of the artist. Drawing is an intellectual pursuit, even a philosophical one; early theories of drawing invoked Plato’s notion of the representation of the ideal in nature. Sissia’s earlier landscape drawings were much more literal in term of this relationship: she would observe the view that interested her, and then attempt to reproduce it. Today, her drawings exploit the mimetic tradition by blurring the line between what she perceives and what she feels. She challenges the notion of precision in terms of observation: the lines in her work seem to create the boundaries not of distinct and identifiable shapes, but of blurs, smudges, and ambiguous forms. Drawing also allows an artist to build an image slowly. In Sissia’s case, individual marks accumulate to produce a paradoxically vast and cohesive landscape of gesture and tone. Her lines often seem to be following some path that the viewer cannot quite discern. While drawing has traditionally been understood as the ultimate medium of mimesis, she suggests that it might be used to undermine the very idea that nature is directly observable at all. Rather, there is a symbiotic relation- ship between the observer and the observed. Sissia’s drawings evoke the fact that experience is both something you enact, and something that happens to you. Life, as it is lived, leaves its mark on you.

Mental landscape XXVII

Graphite and colored pencil on rice paper.

80 x 57 cm

Paisaje Mental II

Big Sur

Argentina

I never did anything out of the blue

Conversation between Yvonne Kook Weskott and Tulio de Sagastizabal

TDS : It is important to point out that the exhibition in the gallery only represents a fragment of Mariana’s work, of her current work. In fact, whenever you are looking at one of Mariana’s pieces, you are in fact only looking at a fragment of her work, since her production is one uninterrupted continuum. Each piece is an episode, or a series of episodes part of a long story, where the sequence of these episodes can either be interchangeable or alternative. Her work is always unfinished, in constant movement and ongoing. Having started with drawings in a specific size, her work then expanded onto ever increasing sizes, up to many metres long, involving long and arduous procedures. YKW : Benway associates Mariana’s work with the action painters from the abstract expressionist movement, which is comparable, because when you see Mariana at her work table, in front of large sheets of papers -even rolls of paper of up to 10 metres long, which cannot be spread out in their totality- she approaches her work from different angles, without any sort of previous planning. The resulting image is a documentation of that action, of the physicality of that action. Although the attitude is less vigorous and more meditative than the american action painters. TDS : Yes, they are indeed different strategies. Although there is always a performative attitude in drawing or painting –which varies according to the levels of gestuality which goes with the process, and which depends on each painter- in the case of Mariana particularly her style has to do with using the whole body, where she sprawls herself over the work table in order to continue the drawing that appears to overflow beyond her, even physically; as if immersed in music and the artwork, as if the drawing were all encompassing. Consequently, in some of her works, Mariana appears to be representing ‘something’, whereas in fact she is representing her own action. What she represents isn’t so much a motif, but rather the proof of her own presence; and this presence is conveyed in different ways, in different times, with different temperaments, and different modulations. Her works are practically a sort of long cryptic autobiography, because it is impossible to translate what the works say of themselves.
Artists often begin with a sketch or a preparatory study, which they then carry out, and this allows for a certain distance with the work, a certain possibility for preliminary reflection. But when Mariana says “I have no objective, I begin with frottage” she is referring to a way of surrendering to the drawing, where the rhythm, definitions and contents that appear respond to a strong level of chance. In Mariana’s work there is a constant play between control and lack thereof, something like a controlled lack of control. The key in her work is the thoughtlessness and spontaneity, where the intensity of the drawing varies according to different moments in the day. YKW : This way of working, sprawled over the work, as opposed to standing or sitting in front of a canvas, enables her to have a polyphony of perspectives. TDS : Rosalind Kraus has a wonderful text where she mentions how the perception of the artist who works sprawled on all fours over the canvas instead of facing the canvas changes -such as in the case of Jackson Pollock- because the horizon line of the point of view is completely different. And you can see this in Mariana’s work: in her drawings there are images that seem to come from a specific point of view, and then suddenly, in the same drawing, you encounter images that seem to come from an aerial point of view. And then there are instances where Mariana herself appears to be part of the drawing, as if it were wrapping her completely like an inverted panopticon, where her figure merges into the scenery. YKW : I also think that this merging that you mention, that can be detected in those fragments that seem to be drawn from different centres, also reflect the contemplative disposition with which she approaches all of her work. Mariana mentions that in order to draw she needs to be in a certain state of mind. “When my breathing slows down and my mind becomes blank, that is when the drawing materialises and expands, like some sort of organic matter”. So on one side these drawings are a reflection of her state of mind and its fluctuations, and on the other hand, there is the idea of letting go of one’s self, in order to listen, and allow what emerges to materialise from a dialogue, where the drawing either guides or is guided through Mariana. It is important to distinguish this process from that of merely unloading. TDS : There certainly exists a paradoxical game where you are creating the drawing, but in the process the drawing starts to direct you. So one could say that, at a certain point, the drawing is defining you. There is a point of surrender, where one becomes the passive subject of the one that dominates, which in this case is the drawing. There are moments when one is the creator, and other moments when the work of art takes over. In the case of Mariana, there is quite a strong case of non-subjectivity when it comes to creating her work. By this I mean that her subjective intention does not go beyond basic decisions, such as the use of pencil and paper. She then gives into the evolution of the drawing, in its own time and development, and this is when the images emerge. Landscapes begin to materialise. Although I'd rather not use the word landscape, as I find its notion limiting and incorrect. The landscape refers to a specific type of painting, like a cut out from a larger scene, where one sees something that has a beginning and an end. And this is precisely why we are attracted to Mariana’s work, because of the lack of beginning and end, apart from in its formats and dimensions. In fact, one could also say this about her trajectory in general. The changes that naturally occur in all artist’s creative development due to a subjective proposition, in the case of Mariana occur because of her perseverance and commitment to one specific creative path, which lead her to explore and further delve into that same path, with the conviction that it is limitless; a path that enables her to discover universes for which she does not need to do anything other than surrender to the basic requirements and minimal implements that she uses. Mariana reproduces something fundamental and central to art, which is the ability to reveal an infinite universe with a single utensil. YKW : I find it appropriate that you mention the ideas of landscape, and continuum in Mariana’s work. It appears that as Mariana progresses in her activity, the work increasingly becomes a flow of consciousness; and this is another reason why there can be no beginning nor end within this flow of becoming. As if nothing other than a specific time, or a certain way of being was being represented. The limits of the rocks and mountains are being diluted, and become permeable, until they seem to be nothing other than mere markings on large rolls of paper that hang from the ceiling, and need to be read vertically - something which differs greatly from the horizontal view that we are used to seeing when looking at a landscape. TDS : Yes, I’d say that she is increasingly drawing more instances than actual figurative subjects, moments in time that represent being in that moment and in a certain way. What predominates is a more austere and less representative image, where the works become depictions of textures; where an aerial view becomes so distant that all that is left for you to see of the mountain are its textures. Sometimes they look like piles of rubble, and other times they look like little excavations in totally arid terrains, where there is no point in creating any other kind of figurative representation. That is why they transcend themselves and we can no longer refer to landscapes. Because what Mariana has been doing is demolishing any kind of recognisable representation, and what is left is this strong relationship with the materials, and the representation of the act of creating. As if the act of drawing was stripped bare, increasingly crude and direct. The idea of continuum becomes more and more prominent, where there is no more time left for details. YKW : Yes, the images are becoming progressively stripped and strange. I think that the idea of unfamiliarity is a constant in Mariana’s work; present in her previous works of the canvas pools, skateparks and slides, they remind me of Robert Smithson’s anti-romantic idea behind his ruins in reverse. I am referring to those unfinished places with industrial remains -like unfulfilled promises- that elicit such strangeness. In her later works, the images look more like depictions of a faraway land that were photographed by an old recuperated telescope. They are like fossils of an extinct civilisation –for which we are the only witnesses- a call to reinterpret them and restore a sense of meaning. TDS : They are uninhabited environments, and there is an invitation to inhabit them again, but in order to do that there needs to be some kind of initiation, as if in order to settle into this universe -which isn’t naturally accessible- one would need to go through a process of transformation. These aren’t welcoming places at first glance. In order to inhabit these places you need a certain level of austerity. YKW : That’s true. They demand for one to go through a process of personal asceticism, practically like a kind of baptismal bath. Maybe this is due to the rigorousness, the constancy and discipline with which she realises her actions that her works have a certain aura of religiousness, the essence of a cloister, a rite… TDS : And silence too. It’s interesting how there is always a play with silence, that’s the first thing that summons you. It’s an invitation to meditate and contemplate, and highlights a tradition in art which invites one not to simply walk past and look at things from the corner of one’s eye -which is a very poor connection or behaviour in front of a work of art. Mariana’s work calls, through its own nature and extension, for a personal connection with it; it transforms your relationship with the work into an experience. And the medium for that relationship with contemplation is the silence that the work instigates.
This is about a discipline which avoids being a spectacle as a condition for developing the work. The spectacle has something to do with supermarket shelves: which products shine the most or have the strongest colour, and call for our consumerist tendencies. Whereas Mariana, with few materials, a pencil, paper and a rubber -which I don’t even think she uses much- sets out to create large scale works. That relationship between the minimal and the grand establishes a framework for the development of the work that is both distinctive and outstanding. The magnitude of these works is surprising considering the materials she uses to create them, and she does it so naturally. This demonstrates her complete trust in the passion that drives her, and the power of the pleasure she derives in this constant work which produces the most sublime results.

Mental landscape XXXIII

Graphite and colored pencil on rice paper.

64 x 50 cm

Tender

Braque prize.

Immigrant Museum, Buenos Aires.

Composición III

Graphite on paper.

90 x 70 cm