Catalina Pabón

Opening reception: Friday, 11 June, 2010, 7pm
12 June though 24 July, 2010
Tue - Sat 11am - 7pm

This exhibition of work by Colombian artist Catalina Pabón entitled En el limbo (In limbo) shows pastel works on canvas. Catalina Pabón’s subject is landscape. However, not the picturesque, beautiful view of an idyll with charming details, but landscapes that are usually rugged, stony, and not easily accessible. We are thus confronted with cliffs, a glacier, or an icy sea, or our gaze is lost in the expanses of the steppe, dramatically set in scene with an extremely low perspective.
The drama of the images is amplified by the use of overwhelmingly dark colors. Applied to a usually black background, the highly pigmented white and gray tones are what set the accents and give the landscape its striking shapes. But the forms only hesitatingly take on contours, remain sketchy and vague, and the beholder is only barely able to recognize the landscape. Accordingly, these paintings by Catalina Pabón are not landscapes with recognition value, but rather archetypes and visions. They themselves remain in limbo, impressions that ultimately are filled with the experience of concrete landscape of the beholder. Decisive is less their taking recourse to the concrete form of the motif as the communication of an associative and emotionally subjective mood.
In other images by Catalina Pabón, like the rocky massif mentioned earlier or the glacial view, the landscape motifs are clearly elaborated. In the frontal view from an equally low perspective, the rugged cliffs tower above us. Staged in such a manner, they vividly communicate an impression of the danger and inaccessibility of the locations depicted. Here, Catalina Pabón touches on a feeling that can best be described with the notion of the sublime. Even if the roots of the sublime as an aesthetic category alongside the beautiful and the picturesque reach back to the eighteenth century, in view of the works of Catalian Pabón much of this evidently still remains valid. It is especially the contrast between natural beauty and the sublime, which in Kants words appears “to contravene the ends of our power of judgment . . . and, as it were, to be an outrage on the imagination.” And to continue with Kant, the origins of this disparate feeling lie in the restive form of the objects themselves, which lack all proportion and inner balance, instead nature in its chaos, its wildest disorder and devastation. The sublime issues a danger, it could bring the order to collapse and show humanity its weakness. But this is precisely the attraction, and Kant’s point, both from an intellectual distance to become aware of oneself as an intelligible reasonable subject. It is not so much nature itself that is sublime, but rather the effects that its size and power can trigger in the beholder.
These considerations simplify to a certain extent the visual access to Catalina Pabón’s often puzzling and immense landscapes, but also explain some of their charm, and alongside their technique a further special characteristic of the images. Once again, it is the limbo that here comes to bear when the beholder is torn back and forth between the perfection of the depiction and the subject of what is represented and becomes conscious of his observing and evaluating role, but still cannot provide the necessary distance for a value-free gaze. Here, the works of Catalina Pabón differ from many uses of landscape in contemporary art which usually distinguish at least programmatically between view and perception, yet only ultimately grant visible from to one of the two approaches. And this distinction marks the remarkable uniqueness of the art of Catalina Pabón.