by Gloria Feinberg

This article was originally published in Art & Studio NYC magazine.

It seems auspicious that the Mexican painter Ingrid Rosas, who has published a collection of poetry entitled Between Heaven and Exile, is a writer as well as a visual artist, since her paintings not only incorporate words and phrases but also gain their thrust from confluence—that gestural juncture at which handwriting and painting meet and cohere.

Widely exhibited in both Mexico and Canada, Rosas’s recent exhibition at Agora Gallery, 415 West Broadway, showcased an exquisite sensitivity to linear lyricism. Her mixed media paintings, like those of the two American artists Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, stemming from an Asian source, in that they are calligraphic rather than painterly in the Western sense. Even Rosas, however, does not by any means imitate Asian techniques or nuances. Rather, she assimilates Asian influences with an uncanny capacity to convey a highly personal sensibility in sound and visual symbols.

In her works, she effectively combines the rural and the image to specifically poetic effect, much in the manner of the literati painter/poets of ancient China and Japan. In the work Heaven,” for example, floating forms resembling butterflies are juxtaposed with thrusting vertical strokes that suggest tall weeds. These elements are enclosed within a border in which the artist has written out the following poetic text:

This exhortation, combined with the swiftly drawn imagery, has a directness and simplicity akin to the avant garde picture poems of Kenneth Patchen and Bob Brown. Indeed, Rosas has attained a similarly successful fusion of word and image, directly in the avant garde lineage that includes medieval Illuminators, the great English visionary William Blake, and French surrealist poet René Michaux. Like such great predecessors, Ingrid Rosas strives to simultaneously merge and transcend the two mediums, to create a multidimensional form of expression that approaches both sides of the brain simultaneously.

At the same time, however, some of her paintings can stand on their own as paintings, as seen in Trail 4003, a work in oil and acrylic in which cursive brush calligraphy gesturally flows from high to low waves and are intersected by vertical thrusts suggesting tall weeds. One cannot help but to slow head down in a quasi-meditative stroke. Here, Rosa’s forceful gestural velocity recalls Jackson Pollock. Another work in mixed media, entitled Encounter 4006, achieves a more deliberate lyricism, as well as an ontological realism, with graffiti-like crosses and simplified floral forms superimposed onto a subtly modulated, yet nonetheless rich and moving, pigment surface on a level ground.

In these paintings as well as the larger and more inclusive category of paintings of regularly rectangular shapes, Ingrid Rosas achieves her elegant current purpose: works in which painting and poetry meet and marry happily.

We must approach the work of Ingrid Rosas with a clean and calm gaze, unloaded from presuppositions about abstract art, since she works from a clearly spiritual beginning in the search for balance, in the millenary style of oriental calligraphers.

Rosas successfully manages to combine word and image, placing herself in the lineage of the great artists that includes medieval illuminated.

Instagram

**************

Ingrid Rosas was born in 1967 and currently lives in León, Guanajuato.

She has exhibited extensively in Canada, USA, Cuba, Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Romania, Mexico, Croatia, Montenegro, New Zealand, Serbia, India and elsewhere. She has worked on projects concerning of justice and peace.

Discover Lokkal:
Watch the two-minute video below.
Then, just below that, scroll down SMA's Community Wall.
Mission

Descubre Lokkal:
Ve el video de dos minutos a continuación.
Luego, justo debajo de eso, desplácese hacia abajo por el muro comunitario de SMA.
Misión

Visit SMA's Social Network

Contact / Contactar