ORIENT / OCCIDENT, ABSTRACTION / FIGURATION:
SEGMENTS IN THE CREATIVE WORK
An exhibition of paintings by AIMÉE SEYFORT
14-23 September 2001
at the Rossi and Rossi Gallery,
91C Jermyn Street
London SW1
For Aimée Seyfort, beside the subject-matter or theme of a work of art, its material and aesthetic dimensions are always of primary importance: the content, form and physicality of a painting or drawing are in a certain sense co-equal. The viewer is thus to be confronted with a thing of real beauty. Aimée Seyfort never had time for the now fashionable cult of the ugly, the rebarbative and the crassly provocative. In her view, the creative capacity within the artist makes possible, not just a (re)presentation of the natural world - a natura naturata - but, rather, the showing, even the revelation, of a certain natura altera or other nature of true and supernal beauty (though not necessarily one of mere gracefulness or prettiness). The finality of a work of art is thus to make visible 'the contours of spiritual content' (as Giorgio de Chirico once said of Sandro Botticelli's work). Yet artistic creation is not solely contemplation and visualisation; it is also the imparting of body, form and life to the artist's vision, of actualising it so to say by lending an appropriate 'incarnation' or plastic embodiment.
For her purposes, natural forms were very often found more suitable than purely abstract ones, so that much of Aimée Seyfort's work could no doubt be described as figurative, if not naturalistic or representative. In more recent work of hers there is found, however, a nearly abstract deployment, for symbolic or anagogical purposes, of natural shapes and motifs. Inevitably she found herself faced in her work with the problem of how to represent in plastic form the higher, non-discursive realms of experience and understanding (a problem once encountered by Botticelli in depicting Dante's Empyrean). What may appear in her work as a cosmogram depicting cosmogenesis stands, symbolically or iconically, for a moment in psychogenesis. This is, then, so to say a cosmological or macrocosmic psychology.
Throughout Aimée Seyfort as been interested in exploring, and working towards, syntheses of forms of thinking and expression. Like so many other young artists, she turned her attention early to the pre-Raphael Renaissance, especially to the period from Duccio to Uccello (who was a favourite of hers) still closely linked in its beginnings with the Byzantine world. From within herself, as well as from her teachers and her milieu where the artistic world of Diaghilev's ballet was playing so prominent a rôle, she came to understand the possibilities of a true integration between artistic traditions of the western and eastern parts of the vast Eurasian continent she inhabited. At that time the art of Africa too was attracting the attention of creative artists. In the sequel, she became interested in investigating the Greek and Hellenistic components in our heritage.
From her early years onwards, however, she was profoundly attracted by the civilisations and arts of Asia; and she has accordingly devoted many years to investigating the arts of India, the Himalaya and Central Asia including Tibet. In her later work she also concerned herself increasingly with seeking to fathom the nature of the interrelation between Buddhist and Brahmanic/Hindu thought and artistic experience, twin areas that sprang from virtually the same Indian soil, but which nonetheless developed distinct forms and evolved differentiated patterns of expression.
The creative undertaking of the artist is surely not a simple question of stylistic or surface influences (though such may on occasion also play their part). Nor is it just a matter of an agreeable excursion in foreign parts, of some kind of pleasant 'dépaysement'. Rather, in Aimée Seyfort's view, an artist's task may be to evolve, through thinking and hard creative work in the arts, a genuine internalisation and integration, in both forms and contents, of what we are accustomed conventionally to call 'East' and 'West'. Just as the 'old' humanism of the Renaissance could enrich and vivify the West by drawing on the classical civilisations of Greece and Italy - and like the artists around Diaghilev who did not hesitate to make use of not only Slavic but also 'Ta(r)tar' elements - so (she concluded) the 'new' humanism and spiritual culture emerging in the course of the twentieth century should be enabled to bring together, in a truly creative assimilation, the two ends of the Eurasian continent. To those concerned with this undertaking - artistic and intellectual, and also spiritual - this is what a genuine globalisation could, and indeed should, signify (and not the diluted levelling, the rootless homogenisation and the commercial market-driven global brands with which we are confronted today).
Such integrative symbiosis and true universality - an authentic interculturally grounded world view - presents the responsive eye and mind of both artist and viewer with a real creative challenge and task, rather than being merely a matter of eclecticism, superficial syncretism and influences, artistic or otherwise. The process is less one of dialogue than of osmosis, internalisation and integration. The endeavour is, then, to construct in the mind's eye, and then plastically to design in a work of art, a widened world of experience, intellect and spirit.
Aimée Seyfort's earlier canvases were in oils utilising an oil medium. But soon she gave up the oil medium, preferring tempera (first egg tempera and then wax medium or encaustique), but generally continuing to use oil colours of the purest quality applied with fine sable-hair brushes on either linen-stretched panels or hand-laid paper. Acrylic pigments were always eschewed. The use of oil colours and the tempera medium she has found especially appropriate for achieving both clarity of line and vibrancy of colour. She has also been fond of sanguine drawings. Occasionally, too, she has made wash-drawings (lavis) and gouaches, more rarely pastels or lino-blocks, but scarcely ever water-colours.
This exhibition presents two segments from the artist's creative work through the third quarter of the twentieth century.
