Chinese windows

One of the tacit objectives of XX century art has been to reflect the inherited tradition of the Renaissance. It’s great discovery of perspective has had prolonged consequences through time. Look and totalized space: the window picture with a conception of space emerged from the cosmovision of the time. The XX century was gradually showing the idea of a new space. Changing, dynamic, heterogeneous, eccentric.

Nora Aslan, who has been working in series in the last years, is placed in the tradition of painting, but from a diverse practice: particular ways of using photography and collage. The first, another way of observing the real, the second a link between art and world. The look through art has been constituted for centuries as the bearer of the interpretation of the surrounding environment. Today, the look, also like space, has turned diverse, instantaneous, successive and transient. Nora Aslan carries out a provocative intervention in her series “Chinese Windows”. She breaks in the window scheme, but from another culture – the Chinese-, to incite a mutation. When impressionism turned up to Japanese stamp or cubism to black art, it was not about mere aesthetical facts but about deep cultural movements.

In the renaissance tradition, the western window picture enabled the vision of a portion of the world. Through perspective, the human eye alone was the mediator between the macrocosm and microcosm. A scene was displayed and the cosmovision of the world was thus integrated through the look.

The Chinese windows are by far an ornamental scheme. In the proximity, this scheme multiplies the visions that the artist joins together through the photographic collage.But, the process begins in the previous work of selection and ordering, close in its rigor, meticulousness, and objectives to scientific work. The precision, free from any randomness, merges with the intention. The photographs thoroughly selected are objective transpositions of versions of what also happens in the panorama of the real in the world. It is about neither artful nor composite photographs. The next stage, the composition, determines each Chinese window.

Since modernity up to now a culture of the imminently visual seems to have been increasingly established in the western world. The old symbols have been destroyed and the new ones don’t seem to have been totally discovered yet. Therefore, a crisis in the deep capacity of symbolizing shows the visual often as vacuous, only as an ornament, as just exteriority.

The works of Nora Aslan belong to a new paradigm, which leaves the modern autonomy of art aside. In each photographic fragment there is a latent revelation of a dense instant that turns pregnant in the duration resource, in the repetition that like litany, it is said again in order to be engraved in the conscience. The subject matters turn around situations about the other, and about the hidden face, about the one that does not boast superiority, in the present culture.

The poetry of Nora Aslan is gradually interweaving itself through an ethical feel that manifests itself this time in the Chinese Windows. It is about the formulation of the question, once again, about the relationship in the western world between suffering and beauty, between ailing and the sublime.

Mercedes Casanegra