Elsa Lopez – 2025
Be squared
E∷⊡◽◻◼
“The abstract drives me to despair, it escapes me,” declared Violette Leduc.
Which is to say: it stirs questions, discomfort, resistance.
Which is to say: no one understands it.
But what should one understand?
A riddle posed by your painting…
I feel lost before it.
It is like the raw sun — harsh, arid, blinding — upon exiting the cavern, shadowy and sickly-sweet.
And from which the gaze may choose to turn away: one ignores it, scorns it, dismisses it as childish — a lesser being, stripped of technique and knowledge.
A strange paradox.
I often hear it said that one must be educated to understand the abstract, and that in this lies its weakness — less powerful, less interesting than the figurative.
But are we not, on the contrary, thoroughly educated in figuration? Conditioned, structured, formatted to recognize and grasp a still life, a landscape, a human figure?
Have we not been taught that this is Beauty — Fine Art?
Isn’t it the very same gaze that the trusting prisoner casts upon the simulacra of his cave, the eye docile, long-polished?
The abstract escapes me because it sets me free.
For the first time, I am no longer subject to the doxa.
I am free.
Desperately free.
Free to the point of suffocating with anxiety.
We know how terrifying the sudden recovery of freedom can be…
Freed from mimesis, released from cliché, the gaze is lit by an affective and philosophical experience.
Stripped of all its mental protections, it surrenders to sensation.
Things and objects vanish behind the explosion of feeling: lights, movements.
What does the prisoner see, who has never yet seen the sky, if not a riot of unknown colors and unfamiliar forms?
From this arise impressions — intrinsic, unpredictable, unassignable, outside of time.
Your painting holds no memory, no perspective.
It is a lightning-flash of creation, escaping us like everything that cannot be understood or retained.
It is neither causal nor narrative, but sudden.
Pure effraction.
To arrive at this point, you had to dive into the Crisis, and pull me with you into catastrophe.
To abolish prejudice, opinion, doxa, in order to reach naked vision.
To escape all pre-vision.
Your painting touches the very edge of existence.
It wipes the slate clean, dismantles habits of thought, dismantles preconceived representations.
It produces the inconceivable.
And there is no other way to exist than to resist:
resist opinion, shame, servility, utility.
Freed from imposed limits, from the teleologies of daily life,
so as no longer to be anesthetized by their prosaic function.
Who, then, could begin to suspect the limits of such painting?
At last permitted to drift, to fantasize in every direction…