No and yes / Together / Two syllables in love.

Octavio Paz

1. Nicole Reiss Rendic. Eros y Psique

Nicole Reiss Rendic (1965), is a Chilean artist who in her adolescence was interested in writing, particularly in poetry, one of her favorite poets being her countryman Vicente Huidobro, who, inspired by avant-garde, cubist aesthetics, produced a poetry of great artistic value; but Nicole later turned to the practice of visual language, whose artistic training began in 1983, in a drawing workshop taught by the Chilean painter and cartoonist Carmen Silva Rojas. Since then, she has carried out several painting, engraving, xylography, and photography workshops. Painting, engraving, and analog collage are the mediums through which she usually expresses herself, although she has also made digital art and participated in editorial projects as an illustrator. Convinced that art shouldn’t be far from the community, but should reach everyone, Nicole has been involved in community and public projects.

In her career she has several individual and many collective exhibitions carried out inside and outside her country. For her work she has received the following awards: Gold Medal Specialty in Engraving, and First Prize for Best Salon Work, both at the V Contest of the International Salon Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2015; Second Prize in Painting, at the Outono Exhibition, Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2015, and Third prize in Digital Art, at the Buenos Aires Art Biennial, Argentina, in 2016.
When consulting Nicole about the artists who have been a source of inspiration in the development of her work, she refers to classic, modern and contemporary authors, among them, in temporal order, she mentions the Frenchman William Bouguereau, Matisse, Picasso, Eduardo Chillida, as engraver, and Andy Warhol; She also mentions Chileans Leonardo Lindermann, her engraving teacher, Mauricio Garrido, collagist, and Claudio Caiozzi (Caiozzama), muralist, who handles the paste up technique. Nicole has nurtured from all of them to conceive her visual discourse with a very personal style and aesthetic concept.
2.Nicole Reiss Rendic. Secretos de alcoba.
Nicole states that in her work she approaches one of the most human realities that exist, eroticism, sex, but within a loving spiritual context. Although she starts from this idea, which sustains her entire visual discourse, she leaves the doors open for other aspects to be investigated and interpreted that are implicitly and explicitly, intentionally, and unconsciously in her work, and inevitably, also in our minds. However, for the moment I will limit myself to the theme of eroticism and spirituality developed in her visual proposal.
The eroticism to which this artist refers transcends the basic, animal function of sexuality. For her, sex and spirituality are not polar opposites, but there is a full connection between the two. Her intention, from the visual language, is the dissolution of opposites in favor of their conjunction, of course, considering the difference between those two. For this reason, her work is developed on the basis of opposing realities, such as man and nature, feminine and masculine, sacred and profane, real, and fictitious, ancient and modern, full and empty, East and West, elements that decontextualize and recontextualize, through a process of conjunction, to create a new reality.
3. Nicole Reiss Rendic. La fiesta loca.
In her work we find iconic erotic, sexual references, both Western and Eastern, Greco-Roman, and Hindu; however, the concept of eroticism and sexuality that she manages is more related to Eastern culture, specifically with sexual practice based on Tantra or Tantrism philosophy, whose judgment on sex is totally opposite to that of Western culture. Tantrism is based on a series of religious texts focused on spirituality. Paradoxically, tantric practice is based on the desire to achieve spirituality through materiality, the body as a repository and channel of sexual energy; that is to say, it consists of a mystical search for the sacred in the erotic, in obtaining spiritual perfection through sexual practice. In fact, the Kamasutra, an ancient Hindu text that deals with human sexual behavior and the body postures to be carried out in its practice, defines sex as a divine union.
Tantra translates as loom, weave, warp; Kama as sexual pleasure and sutra as thread, that fiber or textile material with which it is sewn and woven; that is to say, that these voices allude to the idea of ​​intertwining, uniting, and, precisely, in sexual action two bodies intertwine, are woven into a single being. In the union of the bodies and the opposite principles, duality is transcended. In tantric sexual rites everything is integrated, the feminine and the masculine, body and mind, flesh and spirit, the self and the other.

Although the idea of ​​conjugating spiritually through the sexual act, based on the tantric philosophy, is more evident in the works where Nicole reinterprets images from the Kamasutra, as a substratum of her visual discourse she also operates with that idea of ​​interweaving without alluding to directly to the carnal union in works such as Todos somos uno (We are all one), inspired by the iconography of Greco-Roman art.

4. Nicole Reiss Rendic. Todos somos uno
In this composition, full of sensuality, dynamism and rhythm, the characters ─perhaps gods, goddesses, and angels─, who seem to dance, nude and semi-nude, imprinted by elements of nature, are merged into a single entity made up of beings who embody the love in body and soul. We could also say that this composition is a dance of love in which loved ones and nature come together, as in a mystical sexual act. Perhaps in this work, in which drawing, painting and collage are integrated, Nicole's aesthetic purpose is summed up, both in shape and content.

 

Written by José Gregorio Noroño,

 Arte Original.

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