The real and immense study that must be taken up is the manifold picture of nature.
Paul Cézanne 1
. . . a myth is a device to mediate between culture and nature, either by culturizing nature or naturalizing culture.
Thomas McEviley 2
Nature might seem a simple matter: what is not culture is nature. Or more elaborately, what has its being without human agency-the sine qua non of the genesis of culture-is nature. The simple opposition of nature and culture is that of mutually defining terms, on the model of classical linguistic structuralism. One might otherwise propose that the terms are equiprimordial, and thus move against the fundamental asymmetry of the oppositional terms which Gööran Sonesson notes, 3 and which results in the priviledging of the term nature as being defined from within culture. The simple opposition of nature | culture perhaps now seems less simple: the concept of nature itself is a cultural production by humans who with respect to their biological ground are themselves within nature, whose selves are in part a matter of cultural construction. That the notion of nature cannot be simple to us is an aspect of our postmodern situation, within which the notion of direct, unmediated experience even of nature is abrogated. 4 This absenting of nature is in part a matter of :
its eclipse by the object world and the social relations of a society whose tendential domination over its Other (the nonhuman or the formerly natural) is more complete than at any other moment in human history. 5
The postmodern absenting of nature also entails an abrogation of an appeal to nature as the enabling trope of a metanarrative of legitimation, e.g., as Peter Büürger notes, Rousseau's appeal to nature as an Archimedian point from which to critique civilization. 6
Yet, as Horace noted, "naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret." 7 A complication of this shift from a direct to a mediated experience of nature is the curious interchange between culture and nature: cultura natura secunda fit. 8 This Medieval maxim does well enough to describe the postmodern situation, for as Craig Owens urges:
In postmodern art, nature is treated as wholly domesticated by culture; the "natural" can be approached only through its cultural representation. 9
If nature is a matter of cultural production it is the result of a poiesis, a making, a poetics. When nature is regarded as a matter of mediated experience, that mediation is already thematized in the re-presentation of the natural domain within the cultural domain of the artwork. So in Giselle Castro's paintings. The matter then is to engage the poetics that enable these representations to be as they are. That Castro collectively titles the body of work Nature's Poetics is to privilege nature as causal agent over the techne of cultural production, and thus to imply the absence of the agency of the artist as efficient cause of the works. To do so is a conceit: one recognizes Castro's paintings as paintings, and indeed paintings that engage not only the oppositional terms of nature and culture but the traditions of painting as painting. To thus recognize the works as paintings is already to stipulate the human agency of their facture, even as that facture deploys mathematizeable natural structures within the formal cause of the works, positioning nature as something worked with rather than subdued in the facture of the works.
Castro's recurring use of the motif of flowers is a synecdoche for nature imposed onto the expansive field of the typically large scale canvases. The flower motif is essentially circular in shape; a 'strong' shape, difficult to break by partial covering, scalable, maintaining its character even when out of focus or distorted. 10 Rather than constituting volumes, the flower motifs form nodes from which perceptual forces are arrayed as directional vectors. 11 Within these nodes, the arrangement of seeds follow the Golden Spiral harmonic interval.12
In Vanishing Vitruvian and Appraching Chaos a single flower, perhaps Protea cynaroides or another of the family Proteaceae, fills the entire field. The primarily yellow ochre and raw sienna hues of Vanishing Vitruvian are punctuated by the radiating pointed red tips of the petals. The scale of the petals varies from the center outward, emphasizing the flower's center as visual climax. 13 The concentric symmetry of the flower structure, oriented essentially parallel to the image plane, dominates the painting. The variation of value within each petal establishes in aggregate concentric circular bands around the central structure of the flower, located in the image field slightly below and to the left of the center of the canvas. This acentric location of the focus of visual weight establishes a subtle instability: the center is denoted without being explicitly marked. In Approaching Chaos, the strict geometry of Vanishing Vitruvian is relaxed as the structure of the flower expands beyond the center of predominantly white petals tinged with red and blue. In the surrounding section of white petals, the circles shifts left and upward to form an ellipse, while the next surrounding section of largely blue petals shifts into an ellipse spilling over the edges of the upper left corner and thrusting downward toward the lower right corner, where it meets a largely red area at the the right and bottom edges. These expansions from a central strictly circular geometry suggest an entropic dissipation of order: "things fall apart; the center cannot hold." 14
In Beloved and Generous Portions, multiple flower elements crowd together to lushly fill the entire field. The four flowers comprising the sumptuously rich red field of Beloved sweep in an upward moving arc across the upper register of the field, with the fourth flower at the lower right corner acting to balance the three upper flower centers. The greenish-yellow centers of red chrysanthemum-like flowers fill the field of Generous Portions, punctuated by occasional red-violet flowers. The red flowers sometimes overlap and sometime underlap the red-violet flowers; this variation between overlapping and underlapping, the recessive-precessive movement of cool and warm hues, along with the value modulation and directional thrust of the individual petals, ripple the surface of the field.
In Silent Landscape and Spritiual Landscape discrete circular flower shapes float across the field. With the thinly painted ground exposed between the flower elements, the flatness of the surface of the field of Silent Landscape and Spritiual Landscape is disconcealed and placed into tension with the spatial effect produced by the difference in scale of the flower elements. This emphasis of figure and ground through their radical separation in Silent Landscape and Spritiual Landscape is analogous to the imperfect transcendence of the materiality of painting: neither merely an arrangement of colored earth and drying oil on a piece of cloth, nor merely an accumulation of flowers within the field of the image, but yet both at once. In Floating in Every Direction, the repeated antherium flowers with red spathe and yellow spadix punctuate the brown field. The contours and prominent veins within the spathes, and the pointed spadices, establish rhythmic curvilinear movements within the field, and largely paralel to the image plane. Somewhat more painterly than the the other, larger scaled works in the exhibition (and in this respect having more an affinity with the smaller studies), Floating in Every Direction employs a counterpoint of thick and thin, translucent and opaque paint handling. The twofoldedness 15 of painting, at once substance and illusion, 16 functions at the level of material as an analogue to the imperfect transcendence of the corporeality of embodied consciousness.
Castro's paintings enter a situation in which nature is no longer regarded in a simple opposition to culture. Within that seemingly imperfect situation, the works come to be with a poiesis that asserts nature as proximate cause, but nevertheless inevitably employ the agency of the artist as efficient cause. Perhaps, as we move beyond the postmodern, we may find in the alterity which is nature a model for the order we deploy in the production of culture. That is not novel: a definition of some venerable age posits art as "ars imitatur in sua operatione." 17
| Beloved | oil on canvas | 90 x 70 |
| Silent Landscape | oil on canvas | 72 x 132 |
| Vanishing Vetruvian | oil on canvas | 84 x 54 |
| Generous Portions | oil on canvas | 36 x 132 |
| Floating in Every Direction | oil on canvas | 54 x 132 |
| Study for Floating in Every Direction | oil on canvas | 20 x 16 |
| Study for Floating in Every Direction | oil on canvas | 20 x 16 |
| Study for Floating in Every Direction | oil on canvas | 20 x 16 |
| Study for Floating in Every Direction | oil on canvas | 20 x 16 |
| Approaching Chaos | oil on canvas | 60 x 54 |
| Rilkean Bloom | oil on canvas | 24 x 24 |
| Study for Rilkean Bloom | oil on canvas | 20 x 16 |
| Study for Rilkean Bloom | oil on canvas | 20 x 16 |
| Spiritual Landscape | oil on canvas | 60 x 54 |
| oil on canvas | ||
| oil on canvas | ||
| oil on canvas | ||
| oil on canvas |
Giselle Mendes de Oliviera Castro was born in Brasilia, Brazil, and lived in Italy, Korea and Japan before settling in America at age sixteen. She received the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Dallas, and the Master of Arts degree from the University of Texas at Dallas. Recent exhibitions include Giselle Castro, Longview Museum of Fine Arts, Longview, Texas, 2000; Silent Landscape: Paintings by Giselle Castro, Irving Arts Center, Irving, Texas, 2000; Nature's Poetics, University of Texas at Dallas, 1999. Ms. Castro lives in Dallas.