MARISA CULATTO
Susana Blas
“The time of plants: they always seem paralysed, immobile. But
turn your back on them for a day or two, a week, and they become more
themselves in their stance. Their members have multiplied. What they are was
never in doubt. It is their form which, moment by moment, finds its own
truth."
Francis Ponge, Taking the Side of Things (1942).[1]
It’s hard to lend words to my first encounter with Ophelia (2014) and Flora (2015), the two new photography series by Marisa Culatto. These images speak to us of what happens when the vegetable kingdom comes into contact with water. Subtle traces of the arboreal. Flowers, remains of plants, seaweed – all these emerge and engage with one another, seemingly by chance, sometimes submerged, sometimes frozen. Maybe this is not so much a portrait of reality, we feel, but an impression of it. There is in these images an unstudied honesty by which critical judgement is finally disarmed. They defeat theory, just as theory is defeated by a haiku. I might even say that, like the haiku, her images waive any form of judgment. They are snatches of truth, filtered by reason, given life by the heart.
Two authors who came to mind were the poet and essayist Francis Ponge (1899-1988), whose literature examined the quiet world of objects, and John Ruskin (1819-1900), the critic who launched the Pre-Raphaelites to fame. Ruskin suggested that the pleasure we feel when faced with nature is not a question merely of feeling but also of thought, even of knowledge – of science. He urged the artist who intended to paint a landscape to equip himself first with an awareness of geology and botany. To depict nature, he said, requires you to find a balance between feeling and thought. Ruskin called this the “innocence of the eye”, a form of ordering that enables us to capture the ineffable impression caused by the natural world. Of the resources needed to achieve this end, Ruskin pointed to the need to represent things indistinctly and at a distance. I find a resonance here with the art of Marisa Culatto. To photograph the underwater vegetation in the Ophelia series, she uses a premeditated distance and scale. She herself has confirmed this. She says, “I produced Ophelia on a large scale to make it more unreal. If you don’t blow them up, you lose the blur conferred by the subject being under water.”
The series happened by chance, and this, too, has left an
imprint. The formal decisions adopted – for example, the recourse to
multiplicity – capture the emotive, shapeless cosmos that exists only in the
medium of water. “Ophelia is an encounter. I was a on a beach in England.
When the tide ebbed, I found pools formed in the sand, hundreds of them, each
one containing a tiny cluster of seaweed. It reminded me of the floating
vegetation in the Pre-Raphaelite painting Ophelia, from which the series takes
its name. That’s the thing about that painting that has always fascinated me.” Marisa’s
discovery of watery cavities stocked with plantlife suggested to her a work of
art that could only take the form of a series. “I expect you’ve realised that
I’m interested in repetition. And here I hit upon a whole series, placed in
front of me purely by nature.” So expanding on the concept of a series or
succession, for this artist, is no trifling whim. It is constitutional, it is
of the essence of her practice. Marisa has given up on the standalone piece as
a matter of conviction. “I like repetition. As a young girl I collected all
sorts of things. Just the one thing isn’t enough for me. For me, it’s not about
the one testimony. It’s about something lyrical, a pictorial song that carries
on.” Let’s assume for a moment that her photographs issue from a single voice,
but form a story that is ultimately endless and of uncertain meaning: her
“plant landscapes of the mind" are all different, but in some sense the
same. Ideas flowing in the magma of the
mind, sometimes brushing against one another, sometimes suffering floral
accidents, vegetable afflictions. As if in a state of meditation, we feel the
ideas flitting in and out, flowing, tickling the brain without harm. We observe
that flow of life, and do no more.
Perhaps without necessarily meaning to, Marisa has taken a
place within the thought of Buddhism, giving up on any single account of the
real, embracing change instead. In one of her letters to me, she writes, “An
abiding interest of mine is the idea that reality does not exist as a fixed
concept. It is just a hypothesis, which you interpret for yourself, filtering
it and rebuilding it in accordance with constraints of your own... Aesthetically,
I think this notion is wonderfully expressed by reflections and transparencies.
Transparency, whether in the pools of water of Ophelia or in the ice of Flora,
seems to let us see something, but in fact what it does is distort and blur our
vision.” At this point I return to Ruskin. That nineteenth-century critic’s
theoretical approach finds common ground with that of this artist – let’s
capture impressions beyond understanding and avoid deceptive clarity, let’s aim
for a fluid transparency. And I could add a further point where Ruskin and
Culatto are at one: an interest in small, apparently insignificant things
which, when seen on a greater scale, become vast, a micro-world enclosed in
another, a whole within another whole. Ruskin lauded the concentrated points of
view proposed by Turner, who perceived intimations of morality even when
sketching a sward of grass; while Marisa, in her frozen still lives of the
plant world, builds a cosmos. This play with the dimensions of emotion evokes
for me Ponge’s delicious meditation on the subject of a seashell: “A shell is a
small thing, but I can make it measureless when I rest it back where it was on
the expanse of sand. For then I shall take a handful of sand and find how
little of it remains in my palm after it slips through the gaps between my
fingers. I'll look first at a few sand-grains at once, and then at each one in
turn. None of those grains will seem to me then such a small thing, and soon,
that sculpted conch, that oyster shell... will rise up in my view as a vast
monument.”[2]
Yet the exploration begun with Ophelia (2014) is taken
further in Flora (2015): we find a reflection on how existence is transient,
matter decays, and bodies perish. When
we look, then, on how existence changes state, in the hands of the artist water
becomes a medium of metaphor and of conjuring. And she confessed to me: “For a
long time, long before I conceived of Ophelia, I'd thought about bringing together
a composition and freezing it, and then making pictures after the style of a
still life. When I finished Ophelia it became clear to me that the composition
had to be of plant life.” The conceptual intention addresses beauty, and the
loss of it, and the vain attempt to hold onto it. In the end this speaks of the
very act of photography: to freeze the moment. Water – which in so many
cultures is a symbol of immortality, the eternal cycle of existence – changes
state, mutating from vapour to liquid, from liquid to ice. These are still lives
in celebration of the living, the fresh, but also of the rotten: of that whose
glory lies in the past. Marisa takes
stock of her fears; she sees the repulsion but also the draw of growing old.
She has learned, therefore, to hallow the worn faces of older women, and find
in them a unique fading beauty. And yet decrepitude remains a thing of terror. She does not judge. She only shows – like a
haiku, perhaps touched upon by melancholy.
To overcome the myriad choices of the shapeless world she
has ventured into, Marisa devises routines, simple personal codes that place
bounds on her field of action. No more than two frozen receptacles at a time,
for instance; and nothing goes in which she didn’t find herself on her daily errands
from her home to the centre of town. It
is this random orderliness that whispers the story of her work, shielding her
limitless sensibility from chaos.
“The beauty of flowers as they fade: the petals twist as
though stung by flame. And that’s what it really is, a dehydration. They twist
round and bring to view their seeds, choosing now to set them free in the open,
that they may take their chance."
Francis Ponge, Taking the Side of Things [3]
"When I kneel
at the chrysanthemum
life goes quiet."
Shuoshiat the chrysanthemum
life goes quiet."
Translation by Mike Escárzaga
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