Betwixt and Between
by Mark Gisbourn

Maria Serebriakova
by Valentin Diakonov

Betwixt and Between (The Imaginary World of Maria Serebriakova)
by Mark Gisbourne

The becoming Chora or interval, a potential space and / or ideal receptacle, as Plato originally called it, is the third interstitial condition of the world that has neither a fixed state of being or non-being: it is a time-space reality awaiting to be filled with transitional nature of forms. It remained, as far as the great Greek philosopher was concerned, an unresolvable non-specific nexus in which, as he imagined according to his view of ultimate reality of ideal “forms” ¹ were held in opaque relations between the world of sensible and the intelligible. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (following Husserl) clarified matters and brought it into the existential sphere as the “clearing” (he uses it as the site and formation of Being), whereas later literary phenomenological-minded and existential thinkers such as Maurice Merleau Ponty and Samuel Beckett have imagined it as a mental interstice or indefinable pause or doubt (aporia) in the external enactment of things. ² Not surprisingly therefore it has been made the subject of subsequent various linguistic investigations, so that for Julia Kristeva it became an indefinite condition in semiotics that operated between signifier-signification and the symbolic language world of the patriarchal realm. ³ However, the essential and less semiotic point of relevance is that the creative mind can focus in on this space of the open imaginary, rather than be immediately determined by the materiality of the objective world. In pictorial terms the imagined Chora might be said to represent the non-place, and at the same time an any-place (the “nowhere” and the “now here”), an imagined construction or expressive projection of subliminal consciousness.

The paintings of Maria Serebriakova, to the extent that they can be said to intentionally represent a given or known visual world, are as much about the nowhere and everywhere of her personal sensory experiences as a painter in the studio. Serebriakova has always been attracted to states of undefined psycho-phenomenological liminality, those interstitial spaces and transitional mental and emotional states that exist between what can be formally imagined and what must eventually be posited as the substance of material reality. Hence her current series of landscape-related paintings address the problematic of Chora (Gk. Khora) or interval, spaces where imaginative representation creates states of pictorial pre-signification. In her large painting Threshold of Appearance the case is made immediately. We stand before an image that seems to frame an open wasteland, and at the same time we are encompassed by the framing arc commencing left to right of a ragged rock formation that suggests in fact that we might even be in a cave looking out. Not surprisingly one is tempted to think also therefore of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the chora-tic status of reflection and shadows, things seen though expressed in this instance with an inverted rationalist outcome. ⁴ It is less the fact of other realities that have to be surmised, but of representation left in an unresolved or floating state of imagining. A further analogy can be made with the commonplace human hypnagogic and hypnopompic affects, those mental experiences that exist at the threshold of consciousness – from wakefulness to sleep and sleep to wakefulness.⁵ It is at such times that we commonly experience analogies with the Chora of transitory and imagined forms, since representational images need to held by something material to be sustainable, but like the temporary nature of the mirror reflection things and forms of appearance necessarily slip away. It is at the same time a place of radical otherness, an open state of transitional self-awareness essential to the formation of existential being. ⁶ 

That Threshold of Appearance marks particular transitional awareness that is formally made evident by the opaque use of a singular soft lovat green paint application, something that adds to the sense of veiled transparency and in certain aspects also reinforces the interstitial space that often exists in Serebriakova’s art between drawing and painting. This series of paintings undeniably deal in part with the dissolving and transitional nature of expressive forms in the visual and mental space that exists between drawing and painting in the extended mark making process. The notion of allusion and translucent memory is also evident in another large painting entitled Memory Traces, a dream-like space with ragged rock formations that are not unlike the familiar mountainous rock scape(s) found in some medieval Sienese paintings. ⁷ This is not to suggest an immediate source as such, but rather a state of associative consciousness, since rocky environments created by artists like Simone Martini are also completely imaginary. At the same time they similarly direct the viewer towards affective eremitic states of mind – to hermit and anchorite locations of meditation – as much as visual depictions of the real world. Hence they both share the sense of chora-tic space and speculative mental projection, expressive “becoming forms” of the extended imagination. This is evidenced by the fact that a reader of the depicted subject develops personal signifying contents for the image – even if, as in the case of medieval painting, some pre-existent symbolic order is familiarly known. And the painting that Serebriakova has titled Memory Traces also has a strong feeling of masked emotions, as the mistiness of the mid-ground floats and billows behind the foreground rocky silhouette. The fact that we confront an emphasis on mental projection and / or vision rather than substance-based realistic material representation and location is expressed by the large vertical format painting the artist has called Eidetic image. Eidetic imagery is by definition a new source of both thought and feeling, mind-pictures of potentially self-revealing open images. But at the same time it must not be confused with the wide reaches of the imagination, since eidetic image effects are limited to a natural and reasonable alterability – unlike the imagination that is unlimited in its possibilities. Eidetic images do not therefore pursue the ridiculous or the fanciful, as the free imagination might choose to do, but actually occur within a state of full consciousness. They are in this respect commonly distinguishable from the more extreme daydream-to-dream-based peripheries that accompany hypnagogic and hypnopompic images. To Serebriakova her feelings for eidetic experiences are inflected with ideas close to Husserl’s approaches to phenomenological reductionism. It was the idea of human experience distilled to reductive essences, which the famous phenomenologist argued as being the condition that formed the basis for all the essential aspects of our sensory knowledge. ⁸

Yet in other sensory and formal aspects this new series of paintings by Serebriakova suggests perhaps yet another interstitial phenomenon. In paintings threshold of appearance, memory traces, and eidetic image, we cannot escape the fact that at the centre of each painting there is a zone-like sense of the void waiting to be filled – but from what and with what you cannot tell? These voids might also be read as apertures of affective consciousness, expectant passages, becoming spaces of future material forms, or alternatively simply as sites of the indefinable? They evoke in their overt humanless reality, not only a sense of withdrawn isolation but also inferences of abandonment – paradoxical states of imaginary appearance and disappearance. And while undoubtedly they have a direct association with landscapes, they are mental memories and personal assimilations transformed into imagined yet detached non-sentient locations. For in these minimalized paintings the affective experiences are offered openly to the viewer, and it is largely left to the viewer’s sensibility to expand the painting’s allusive comprehension at the moment of its reception.

But not all of Serebriakova’s recent paintings have the same feeling of bleak isolation and personal introspection. Though they all embrace different intensities of saturated mental affection and psychological penetration. In the mid-size series of paintings she has called Ideations, meaning literally the process of creating new ideas, there is an intentional psychological take by Serebriakova on particular aspects of phenomenological presence and its hidden potency. The aim is that of addressing, or, at least, broaching the question of what constitutes a perceptual feeling of sensory fulfilment. While we are all familiar with the immediacy of sensory perceptual intuition, the awareness of objects and their parts (serialised sensory moments), and also that objects by extension have “synthetic” categorical and associative corollaries attached to them. Yet this does not constitute a meaningful comprehension of Ideation in the phenomenological Husserlian way of thinking, that is to say what the artist intends to be understood by the viewer in this instance. In phenomenology Ideation (Wesensschau) is a form of essential intuition that exposes the senses to a direct awareness of the categorical essences existing for themselves. ⁹ These are the ideas of introspective “bracketing” or what was later more commonly called by phenomenologists the Epoché. ¹⁰ And it is this intended aspect that informs the series of works so titled by Serebriakova, where what might appear to be highly animated tree roots are embodied extensions suggestive of Nature and its essential organic impulses. They are not inert representative images so much as essential innervations – expressed energies within an ontological system. Though the trunks and the roots are formally focused they break free of any sense of fixedness or rootedness, they are on the move, reminiscent, at least in Tolkienesque literary terms, of the fantastical Ents of Fangorn Forest. ¹¹ The figural twists and turns of the trunks (torsos) and roots (limbs) intimate something of a feeling for dance and expressive movement, almost like surreal and strangely hypnotic phantoms moving through an anonymous landscape. At the same time the pared down and translucent use of singular soft green or sepia-like colours, while reinforcing the use of delineation and bareness, again expresses the artist’s unique blending of painting and drawing as seen though all the paintings of the current series.

The use of psycho-phenomenological states of mind is also presented by artistic intention in the last group of smaller paintings executed and exhibited in the current series of works. They are entitled Melancholy 1 – 4 and represent what appear initially to be ruptured tree trunks being overwhelmed by animated or writhing parasitic liana. However, the strange sensuousness of these interlocking encompassing ropes or skeins creates a contrary sensation in other respects, since they seem almost to caress the underlying natural and organic structure of the largely adumbrated tree. Simultaneous ideas of both the body and consciousness are evoked by the word “melancholy” (black bile), for though it denotes an implied and invariably disturbed state of mind, at the same time it connotes its origins in the medicine of the humours – the fluidic imbalances and flows of Galenic medicine.¹² In a doubled sense both physical and psychical aspects manifest themselves through the subtle yet far reaching allusions of these paintings. It is important to stress and emphasise the body, not least in terms of phenomenology as a philosophy of essential “bodily” experiences. ¹³ An anthropomorphic element is uppermost in these paintings and the inferred psycho-physiological conditions of the studio similarly play their part. The sense of lithe pictorial contortions invariably suggests analogies between natural phenomena and the human, which is paradoxical since the one thing that is almost never present in the paintings of Serebriakova are depictions of an actual human presence. The human inference in the paintings of this artist resides not only in this instance in their naming, since it is self-evident that only humans can suffer melancholy, but in the simultaneously translucent and materialised sense of an uncertain emotional presence in the melancholy paintings – melancholy is after all a state of continuous introspection and self-doubt. It is their distinct inwardness and pictorial enclosure – one might almost say an intimate sense of self-embrasure – that is the most affective and emotionally identifiable quality within these paintings. 

To conclude we are led back to the unspecified state of interval, transitional space, aporia and disjunction, interstices, and the general feeling of the in-between-ness of our emotions as we seek to respond openly and honestly to these cool but at times disquieting and puzzling paintings of nature within nature. Our response is chora-tic to the extent that it calls us to a bracketed mental field of focussed engagement with the emotional floes that constitute the passage of forms; to the condition of solitary introspection, to a “becoming space” of perceptual or imagined essences and suggestive ossibilities. What is undeniable, however, is that these new paintings by Maria Serebriakova are images of transitional meaning and that they reflect upon her own personal and intensely private studio experiences with states of inwardness and emotional passage. Yet it remains the case that the viewer can never know the moment by moment mark making processes at work as the painter paints, and at the point of reception the viewer is left to infer and encapsulate their own sensory interpretations. This has been ever the case with this uniquely Russian artist who dwells in the borderlands of the imagination, the spaces in between, the interface that is at the periphery and the edge. ¹⁴ She is an artist of increasing distillation, of reduction, of place and non-place, of anywhere and nowhere. Serebriakova’s paintings are always a challenge since they never possess a book of symbolic or narrative instructions. The viewer must be guided by their personal sense of aesthetic compass, and at the same time embrace the pre-signification of the Chora as an embodied threshold and living experience continuously at work in our world.