mutabor - THE SYMMETRY OF DISQUIET

THE SYMMETRY OF DISQUIET

Julia Antonia sits, blindfold, at a table. Opposite her, a person she does
not know. A moment of concentration ­"observation" or "meditation"­ and
Julia Antonia begins to draw.
These drawings, which are afterward carved into wooden surfaces and form the
first stage in the construction of Antonia`s space-filling installations,
the artist herself designates as "blind-portraits". Not all the carvings are
portraits of real people. Also delineated here are the essential outlines of
figures stored up in the artist`s sub-conscious and of her own internal
states and conditions.
The space-filling installations of this young Berlin artist are indeed
meditative exercises. They represent an interior monologue, a creative

concentration on the moment of stillness, of stasis amidst the flow of space
and time. A conscious decision by the artist to oppose, in and through her
own person, the process of art`s neutralisation into mere decoration, of the
drowning of the particular in generalisations, of acceleration falling back
again and again into stagnation. The portraits that so emerge are neither
"faces" nor "countenances". Rather, they are a physiognomy of the human
being qua "creature". They are humans captured specifically from the angle
of their participation in essential Being. The artist herself creates her
"human creatures". The representation of that which cannot be seen is, for
her, the contradiction in engagement with which the boundaries between
conscious and unconscious begin, in the process of creation, to blur and
shift.
Julia Antonia groups her wooden panels in specific constellations according
to the size, the architectural form and the atmosphere of the specific space
("human creatures" in quadratic space, "human creatures" in cruciform pose,
"human creatures" at a window) She renders spaces "inhabited", creates an
imaginary "population" of subjective existential "situations" which,
although collective, display at the same time an intense quality of
isolation.
The woodcut technique was chosen by her in order to intensify still further,
by the lines` radical reduction, the concentrated expression of the
essential, of Being per se. A relief in which the traits of essential Being
are brought to expression by a process of incision. The deliberate
deformation of a smoothed-out surface. Lines that have the effect of a
signature.
It is not aesthetic considerations that dictate the colour of the wooden
panels. Each colour is the chromatic space in which she engraves her "blind
drawings". This chromatic space obeys an inner impulse. It is the colour of
the hour, the day, the specific condition or situation. The colour of a
moment.
The action of "blind drawing" can, qua performance, itself form a component
part of an installation. It serves to make clear the artist¹s inner
monologue ­ and at the same time also the meditative dialogue between her
and the person portrayed. It is an allegory of that feeling of "déjà vu"
experienced in the encounter with the repressed, the hidden, the occulted.
In the installation, the mode of intentionality normally characteristic of
the creative process is reversed. The eye of the viewer now finds itself
directed to the "represented interior" of the viewer`s own person, brought
to light by the artist: frozen moments of naked self-encounter.
Each installation represents a transitional stage in a developing "work in
progress" and is subject to a constant flow of modification, extension and
variation.
The installations of the Berlin artist Julia Antonia are confrontations
with, and challenges to, the gallery visitor`s very subjectivity. They are
mirrors deployed in space which compel this visitor to look and see ­ and
which seduce him or her into an active engagement with what is seen and
experienced.




(Text by chetan akhil)