Saturday, May 28, 2005
Return to Modernism
Sophia Vari: Recent Sculptures and Watercolors, Nora Haime Gallery, New York City, Feb 3 - Mar 3, 2005.
By Jonathan Goodman
 | Born in Athens in 1940, Sophia Vari now lives and works in Paris and Pietrasanta, Italy. Her bronzes and watercolors on paper, as lively, elegant, and accomplished as they are, seem a bit like throwbacks to modernism’s golden age, when purity of form corresponded to equally idealist intention. In the world of postmodern art, with its emphasis on subjectivity and a politicized reading of culture, Vari’s objective stance seems to owe more to the inspiration of cubism, and to its ability to imbue both sculptures and two-dimensional work with a sophisticated reading of form. There is nothing wrong with this; Vari’s art is extremely well-defined, and her involvement with shapes reminiscent of synthetic cubism in both sculptures and watercolors make her work easy to like and appreciate. Vari’s connection to her sculpture is, as commentary on her points out, powerfully musical, with shapes that imply motion and movement at their most abstract. The bronzes are patinaed a dark, dull gray, with centers of focus highlighted with black oil paint. This treatment of the sculptures gives them a monumentality that also effectively focuses on their different planes.
The big questions facing Vari and her art are causal in implication. How can someone make this sort of art at the beginning of the twenty-first century? And why is it so important to construct work that so transparently hearkens back to a time when this kind of art had an immediate historical precedent. So much of contemporary art is not even necessarily well made, with considerable attention given to social commentary. Vari’s work celebrates a high modernism that was most effectively broached several generations ago, during the early to middle 1900s. The truth is that I remain attracted to the open lyricism of Vari’s art, seeing in it a quotation from other times. Her technical skill is such that she completes a world with her freestanding poetic forms. Hers is a classical sensibility, with some literary emphasis: one of her most striking sculptures is the vertical column entitled Échelle de Jacob (Jacob’s Ladder, 2003), which rises more than six feet into the air, complementing shapes building upwards on top of each other, in a clearly cubist display of form. Given a dark gray patina, with two painted black spheres, one almost midway up the sculpture, the other at its top, Échelle de Jacob is a modernist reading of the ancient Biblical story.
 | Elegance of motif gives Vari the opportunity to create self-contained art—there is an assurance both to the sculptures and watercolors. The hip irony of the postmodern style is not to be found in Vari’s work, which quotes a seamless history of artistic intention. In a way, the work does not so much undermine much of the art being made today as it places itself outside the current esthetic, which treats the classical elegance of Vari’s art almost as an anachronism irrelevant to current art intentions. The self-fulfilling aspect of Vari’s art, however, gives it an equanimity that is hard to forget; her forms suggest art history—specifically the language of synthetic cubism—in ways that support rather than undermine her art. The classical ideal of pure form is also very much a part of Vari’s vision, its seeming effortlessness a rebuke to the deliberately badly made work of some of today’s art practitioners. Recognizing the school of Paris, Vari tells us a great deal about how an artist can continue within a particular group while, at the same time, maintaining her independence. This is probably her biggest achievement to date: her ability to subsume a tradition and not have her individuality dominated by it. This is a difficult thing to do; however, Vari is successful in her respectful treatment of the sculpture and collage that preceded her.
 | Omniprésence (2003), another bronze given a gray patina and highlighted with black oil paint, is a collection of vaguely Brancusi-like forms, which give the tabletop sculpture its aura of formal complexity. There is a large slab from which half-circles and other forms jut out; at the top of the sculpture, one can see a small, black sphere, seemingly balanced, however precariously, on the downward slope of one of the piece’s planes. The physical idealism of the sculpture gives it a classically modernist flair, while its use of simple planes recalls the greatness of Brancusi, who seems to function as a mentor for Vari. Voyage sur Mars (Voyage to Mars, 2003) consists of interlocking forms with rounded edges, which seem to bulge outward in their presentation of a pure abstraction; this abstraction itself suggests an eccentric landscape whose strangeness might be overwhelming. Once again, a mysterious black ball tops the sculpture, lending the image a shape of effective formal expressiveness. By comparison, Maternité (2003) is clearly a figure, with a round disc for a head and a protruding belly whose outer edge has been given a coat of black paint. While Vari clearly loves abstraction, she is not afraid to walk the gray area between it and figuration, a stance found in the synthetic cubism of artists such as Picasso and in the exquisite reach of Brancusi’s birds. It is remarkable that she can hold her own while suggesting the accomplishments of these major figures.
A similar process occurs with the large watercolors and collages on canvas, which celebrate the abstract form of cubism even more openly than the sculptures. In Ciel d’aujourd’hui (Today’s Sky, 2001), thick and thin strips of paper are cut so that they mostly follow a vertical axis that shades upward, slightly to the left. In the right-hand corner, Vari uses a contrast to the mostly yellow colors of the paper—a small, thin, red strip of paper. In the center of the collage, there are three semicircles that could conceivably suggest the rounded body of a guitar; one senses the artist agreeably quoting from the past, giving a visual context to an esthetic that might otherwise seem slightly decorative. In another watercolor and collage on canvas, entitled Depuis l’aube (Since Dawn, 2002), red dominates the composition, its shades overlapping each other and creating a kind of abstract palimpsest. Two torn sheets of white paper give the piece a bit of contrast on the middle right; the elegant simplicity of the forms is classical in inspiration. L’heure incertaine (Uncertain Hour, 2004) suggests collage through watercolor alone: forms like paper, some of which are decorated with an orange-diamond pattern, overlap each other at various angles; the overlay is suggested by shadows falling just to the right of the forms.
Vari is an inventive, skilled artist equally comfortable in the worlds of sculpture and painting. She derives considerable strength from an artistic tradition that many today would say is open primarily to a historical interpretation; in contrast, if not in open defiance, she establishes a formal dialogue with the past, which gives her considerable formal strength in terms of what she suggests as quotation. Here in New York, we have numerous painters who treat abstract expressionism as if it were still a major movement; artists such as Brice Marden, Louise Fishman, and Sean Scully connect, in their own way, with the New York school, which many also would say is moribund as a contemporary movement. Yet the genuine achievement of these artists cannot be denied; for example, Scully’s closeness to and love of Rothko’s art proves that such associations can be supportive of a contemporary artist. In the same way, Vari looks to the heights of cubism to develop an idiosyncratic, independent idiom of her own. Her esthetic, in equal measure objective and nonrepresentational, historically aware but also contemporary, reminds us that the modernist tradition is meant not only to be studied but also to be used, so that all of us—painter and audience alike—may enjoy what is currently being made as art.
Jonathan Goodman is a contributing editor to greekworks.com.
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