Paintings where spinning sunflowers reign, massive tree branches desperately reach into the sky like human arms, sheep or bulls, depicted as abstract figures, are cast into unreal space. These blooming shapes alone permeate and absorb the composition. Evidence of some insurmountable torpor of an afternoon spent on the high Bolivian plateaux, they parade majestically in a sensual expansiveness. They are accomplished, poised. Formal perfection has been attained. Therefore each detail’s expressive impact is thrust towards a vitalist sublimation whose formal hyperbole evokes the expressionist visions of a Van Gogh feverishly painting cypresses in Saint Remy. The form given to the plant world is a mere pretext in this case, a mere substitute for the personal experience of the artist, who empowers this world to call forth nature.
Identifiable at a glance, Karine’s canvases, painted over the past five years, explicitly refer to the Latin-American universe of which her mother’s side of the family makes her a part. But this universe, intensely experienced by the artist, is a phantasmagorical one, because to a large extent it is imaginary; a world lived at a distance, therefore sifted though fantasies and sublimated into strictly pictorial metaphors.
Having spent the first twelve years of her life in Europe, it was with all the more emotion that Karine was to discover Bolivia, the land of her mother, Graciela Rodo Boulanger, one of the country’s most prominent painters. Growing up in the shadow of her mother’s artistic reputation is no easy task for a young painter – however it is also highly stimulating. Because of the intensity of its expressive power, Karine Boulanger’s painting is far removed from the linear meticulousness of her mother’s work. The daughter’s expressiveness contrasts with her mother’s austerity in an indisputable, masterly way, if by this term we may describe an intuitive approach so subjectively concrete, so subtly insistent due to the hidden force of the paintings’ elaborately wrought backgrounds.
Moreover, it is significant that after such extremely expressive beginnings, for the sake of her stylistic evolution, Karine felt the need to make a break. This silent cure, which lasted several years, led to the blossoming of the densely material shapes that have since invaded the backgrounds in her paintings, backgrounds intensely moulded by pallet knife and scraper. They are the proof of inexpressible experiences that are transformed by the hand’s painful toil into images in which the unconscious is constantly present. A scorched earth of secret moments, these backgrounds transmit the vibrations of the artist’s intense solitude. She manages to sublimate this experience into a realm of supernatural fantasies – the sublimation of the ineffable release achieved by this toil on matter which is hence imbued with some original secret: we understand the principle of metaphysical transgression. The cosmos takes over from the individual; the ideal liberates.
These densely material, expressive backgrounds are covered by gold or silver leaf: nature is plunged into the domain of the sublimated. The background is thus made sacred. Through this meta-expressionist idealization, Karine evokes the spiritual dimension found in the universe of Byzantine icons and the Spanish baroque tradition – and in this case, colonial; so many symbolic approaches to raise human existence to the level of cosmic myths. (Karine reminded me of her need to regularly visit Spain, where she steeps herself in a mystical tradition similar to that of the Bolivian world, just as she often speaks about her fascination for Byzantine icons.)
In contrast to this ideal, supra-material background, the expressive stridency of the sunflower’s leaves takes on an even more liberating meaning because it is apparently – already – free of any relationship with the human form. (But this is just an illusion because we could easily imagine a person in the place of the sunflower.) In which case, we could refer to Kasimir Malevich’s comments on Van Gogh: “When the artist paints, he plants the paint and uses the object as a flower bed: he must therefore sow the paint in such a way that the object disappears, because it is from the latter that the painting that the artist sees will spring forth.” (On New Systems in Art, 1919)
This spiritual and physical “unity of worlds” to which an artist tries to “give life” is strongly present in Karine Boulanger’s most recent paintings. The more the figures seem to withdraw from the sacred background of gold leaf upon which they’re inscribed, the more vibrant is their expression, because the intensity of this expression alone allows them to be propelled beyond reality. This leap into the void, pagan mysticism, is free from any bonds with the here below, like the flight of melancholic saints on Tiepolo’s baroque ceilings. August Strindberg described this intuitive way of casting oneself into pictorial matter thus: “One must paint from the interior of one’s being and not go and copy mountains and plains, which, of themselves, are insignificant and can only take shape by passing through the crucible of feeling and perception of the subject.” (The Role of Chance in Artistic Production, 1894)
Thus, the sunflower, a wild carousel of dishevelled shapes, not to say an image that has become almost abstract, takes on an entirely different, purely expressive meaning. It becomes, as described by Georges Braque, “a pictorial fact”. In Karine Boulanger’s work, this “pictorial fact” is extraordinarily vivid; it speaks volumes for it replaces the human face with the formal rhythm of the vegetal. Concealed by this mask, the artist’s feelings can explode in a dimension that “normal life” doesn’t allow; the artist therefore expresses them even more intensely on the pictorial surface.
The lyrical intensity of the delightfully sensual arabesques of these paintings evokes the universe of another great American artist who, behind the ethereal limpidity of her flowers as abstract as they were baroque, also conjured up the transcendent mysticism of Amerindian civilization’s Latinity: I think of Georgia O’Keefe, whose expressive imagination so closely resembles Karine Boulanger’s sensual harmonies. Separated by several generations and a few thousand kilometres, they indisputably belong to the same artistic family.
Through the intensity of her formal imaginative universe and the purely luminous nature of her pictorial textures, Boulanger belongs to a truly specific style of intimist sensuality that is typically Latin-American. I’ll mention, as proof, the Guatemalan photographer Luis Gonzalez Palma, whose work evokes, without any doubt, Karine’s formal vocabulary and, especially her stylistic range. The attention paid to the hazy light resulting from the blinding sun of Palma’s high plateaux is the same as that found in Karine’s paintings – her Bolivian roots are a theme, what’s more, and she continually refers to them when speaking about her work. This light is the magic ray giving life to the laden backgrounds of her canvasses, animating the solitary shapes that pirouette in an unreal, absolute space, and that, because of this isolation, this mystical solitude, have even more need of an extra-ordinary energetic charge.
The evolution of this profoundly expressionist, baroque artist rapidly led her from Bolivian experiences (lessons with Gonzalo Rodriguez in La Paz in 1988) to Leonardo Cremonini’s studio at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1989 -1991). Just as Karine’s painting technique strongly distances itself from her mother’s work, the remarkably accomplished pictorial vitality of its image firmly incrusted in the densely modelled background places her well ahead of the results achieved by her teachers. A painter of unquestionable flair, and whose mastery begins to prove itself, Karine Boulanger delves deeply into textural and purely painterly experimentation with the force and originality of a genuine talent.
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After several decades of abstract painting, it is justifiable that we question whether creation of the figurative-expressionist kind still merits being produced today, and what aesthetic value it has, what it contributes, at a purely design level, to our sensibility and imaginations in the year 2005. The quality of Karine’s paintings, like those created by Georgia O’Keeffe only a short time earlier, affirm the pictorial validity of the survival of figurative metaphor, as long as the latter is integrated in a symbolic category of absolute “painterlyness”, free of all mimetic constraints of (realist) representation, apart from that, the only true one, of echoing the artist’s inner being. Twentieth century painting is but an eulogy for the fantastic and ethereal; a confirmation of the radiant subjectivity of modern man, free of illusionist constraints, free in relation to the physical world with which he severed all ties more than a century ago. From this moment on, painting could only be a matter of subjectivity that the artist’s sensory impressions alone had the right to probe. By treating isolated shapes as complete units, Karine Boulanger proceeds in the manner of an abstract painter, composing canvases with figures suspended in the beyond of a fictive, ethereal, and therefore absolute space.
Avoiding the cultural constraints of abstract conventions, the work of this artist reminds us that although her compositions are highly subjective, their expressive dimension can be understood by everyone. This is what the choice of ordinary motifs – plants, animals or human beings that we could meet anywhere – suggests. And their commonplace nature is also what makes them ingeniously educational. The feigned thematic triviality of their appearance is the counterweight to their philosophical force. Infusing them with this dimension of subjective expressiveness counterbalances, in a decisive way, their fake banality: herein lies the splendour of Karine’s painting. When reflecting upon the experiments by abstract painters in New York, we could ask what makes Karine’s work different. Are its pictorial ambitions less abstract? Harold Rosenberg, the renowned art critic, summed up the transition from the artist’s intuition to the materialization of the image in this way: “The painter no longer approached his easel with a vision in mind: he moved forward, his materials in hand, to make something with this other material in front of him. The image was the result of these encounters”.